Certification

Starting My Journey through #90Days2MCSA

Hello Everyone! I apologize for my months disappearance from blogging, it’s been a busy March and will continue to be busy throughout TechEd! That is not a bad thing, and I will strive to increase my blogging. One thing that is going to help me in the interim is my Journey to my Server 2012 MCSA!

Michael Bender along with MS Learning has made a push for people to obtain their MCSA with the #90Days2MCSA Challenge, this is a fantastic idea is a great way as a community for everyone to improve their skills.

I’d like to start off by saying I may be a featured certification success story on the 90Days2MCSA site; however I do not have my Server 2012 MCSA yet and that means I get to participate! I’ve been hiding in the shadows and doing some studying with the official Microsoft Press 70-417 Upgrading Your Skills to MCSA Windows Server 2012.

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My 15 Minutes of Fame

Recently I was asked to be on the People Talking Tech Podcast to talk about my transition from college to my IT career. In the process I was also asked to write a guest blog post on the Microsoft Learning Born to Learn blog. It was quite an interesting experiencing having a conversation with someone knowing in the future people would be listening to it. The night of the recording I figured it’d be best to write the blog post so everything was fresh in my mind, I started hammering it out and boom it was done.

Many thanks to SkyDrive for the ability to embed!

If you would like to check it out you can listen to the podcast by Clicking Here. You can also read the blog post by Clicking Here.

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TechEd Day 1 Summary

Day 1 is coming to a close as I write it sitting pool side using the Samsung Series 7 Slate. I have learned a lot of new cool stuff is coming to the Microsoft world in the area of virtualization. However I am disappointed in the lack of technical knowledge that I’ve gained.

It is not that the technical knowledge wasn’t available, it was that I spent my day taking certifications. I started my day early at 7:30am for the Twitter Army, which lead up to going into the TechEd Keynote, I had to leave the keynote early to get to my first certification exam.

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#60Days2MCSE Challenge – Week 6 Update

Personal Updates:

Over the past 3 weeks I’ve been in and out quite a bit from the twitter conversations; however I have still been following along. Things became a bit overwhelming switching from being a student to full time and the opening of my pool and Diablo III coming out was extremely distracting too. I am not too far off from my current plan; however I do feel I need to catch up considering I still do not have a fully functioning lab. I had given up on the unified installer after wasting tons of time on it and decided that it would be more beneficial for me to build everything out manually. Building everything manually is much much more time consuming however I feel I have greater in-depth knowledge doing it this way and do not regret this decision at all.

In the past 3 weeks most of my time has been spent building my lab; but I’ve also spent time watching videos and finding new resources. I’ve watched a few of the MMS videos and below I have two that I feel are very beneficial to everyone and I’ve also found a new resource that I haven’t gotten to use yet but I do believe will be greatly beneficial.

Useful Resources:

Moving Forward:

I can already feel this is going to be a very challenging Tech Ed, I am excited to see everyone and I strongly encourage everyone continue their studies even after Tech Ed is over!

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#60Days2MCSE Challenge – The Plan – The Resources

Challenge Summary:

On April 15th @MichaelBender challenged the readers of MS Learning’s Born To Learn blog. The challenge is to complete the Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert: Private Cloud Certification. This certification requires five exams, I have completed three of these already so I decided that I will take on the challenge of completing two of these exams by/at Tech Ed! I am required to complete two exams, however there an extra exam that is a possible substitute. The exam is the 70-659 (Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualization), which will count as the 70-247. Throughout this blog post I am going to outline my tentative schedule and some of the learning resources I’ve already gathered.

Quick Tips:

  • Read Born To Learn
  • Follow Hash Tag #60Days2MCSE
  • DO LABS! – This is the best way to learn is by doing!
  • Watch Videos – I personally gather more watching than reading

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