Archive for category I.T. Certification

Well, 2009 was a great year.in all, it went fast and with it brought a lot of big changes with it. I made a massive career change into IT, got a beautiful new niece, ended a 7 year relationship, made a bunch of great new friends, dislocated my shoulders countless times and no longer own any mountain bikes at all! There are some pretty epic changes there, but all for the best and stoked to be where I am in my life at the moment and the opportunities I have as a result.

I finished my major 2009 New Years Resolution only a few days ago; acquiring my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification. Stoked to have done it as it’s a well recognised certification in IT and proves I know my stuff; which I really needed to do coming from completely disparate industries (Bicycle Import/Wholesale to IT).

In 2010 I want to further my industry certifications firstly on some well known more broad scope ones such as CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) and upgrading my MCSE from 2003 to 2008. After that I am going to start specialising myself a bit more. I think one of the most interesting and booming areas of IT at the moment is Virtualisation;. VMware definitely has a large presence, but Microsoft and Citrix are really going to challenge this with their excellent and affordable (at times free!) Hyper Visor platforms. In reality, if you can do one of those brands, you can do them all it’s just like driving a different car; essentially everything works the same. I currently use all the Hyper Visor technologies in one form or another at work and at home, but I’m going to choose to specialise in Microsoft Hyper-V virtualisation. While it doesn’t currently have some of the enterprise features of VMware, it has most of the sought after features and is by far the most cost effective solution for SME’s which is the area I would like to stay in. SAN engineering and management is also something that goes hand in hand with virtualisation and something I will also be pursuing.

So I figure I should write down some 2010 New Years resolutions (geek goals!) down so I have something to work towards:

• Obtain CCNA certification
• Upgrade MCSE 2003 to MCSE 2008
• Obtain MCITP : Enterprise Administrator Certification

Non-Geek Goals for 2010:

• Get surgery on at least 1, preferrably both my shoulders to stop them dislocating
• Do a “photo-a-day” photoblog
• Drink a whole slab of beer by myself on Australia Day
• Plan moving to New York to work in 2011/2012
• Get my car license (P’s), next test is the 12th of Jan
• Get my motorbike license (L’s)

Well we’re already 3 months into the year and I’m already falling behind on my personal goal of finishing my MCSE by the end of the financial year. I have been keeping up my study regularly this year and have finished initial studies of the majority of exams, but yet to do final study on these and actually sit them.

So last Friday, I decided to pull my finger out and I booked in my first Windows Server 2003 exam, 70-290: Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment.

I went home for the weekend with my brother and sister, for a belated birthday present for Dad; riding round wineries in Rutherglen. It was a great weekend and obviously had a some good patches of not doing much (especially in the car), making room for some decent periods of study. Having finished studying for this certification in December before I started my new job and with 3 months on-the-job experience since starting in January at my new job, I was very confident that this exam wouldn’t pose too much trouble for me. Over the weekend I did 100s of example questions, averaging around low 80% for these. I was happy with this, especially considering every question I got wrong, I would see what the correct answer was and why this was…so even when I was getting questions incorrect, I was learning about these and wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice.

I had a mini sleep-in this morning and wasn’t particularly worried about cramming in study this morning, instead blasting music, starting my Twitter account and cruising through a bunch of sample questions…procrastination was rife! I rocked in to the exam, very confident I knew the material inside and out. That was until I was actually doing the exam and started crapping my dacks! I was expecting to see questions similar to what I had been studying (since I have probably done about 400-500 example questions on this exam), but nothing at all was similar; it was all new and quite scary! I uncomfortably answered my way through, using the knowledge and experience I had built up. But I was not confident I had done well at all, on the contrary, I was very sure that I wasn’t going to pass (you require 700/1000 to pass)…I found it extremely hard. I finished the last question then held my breath as the very slow computer system calculated my score…only to find out I got 904/1000!

So I left feeling very happy with myself, although physically I felt like I had failed (thanks adrenaline!). Fortunately all the hard work paid off though. 2 Down, 5 to go!