I got back late this morning (2am!) in the UK after spending a memorable weekend in Barcelona after the VMworld EU event. Waiting for me was a parcel from VMware Education. They are the student manuals for the course “VMware vCloud: Deploy and Manage the VMware Cloud”. The course is instructor-led and its recommended for the those want to take and pass the the VCP-Cloud exam. That’s one of my targets/goals for the end of the year (cripes!). As an employee and former instructor, I was able to wangle getting my books before the course actually starts. Normally, you get these books on the 1st day of the course. It feels like old times for me, because I was used to working thru such materials as part of the preparation to teach a new course, but still feels kind of funny to be the “student” this time around. The course is still based on the older 1.5 product, but I would have thought that 99% of the current exam objectives will still be met (the exam is still based on the vCD 1.5 release). I understand a 5.1 version is in the works, but I don’t have time to do wait for it to be released.
Given the way economy is doing right now, training is not immune from the prevailing winds. As we all know the first thing many big business (and small) cut or curtail is staff development during fiscally strained times. I think that’s kind of sad because I’ve often felt that our personal skills are often underdeveloped, and increasing the burden of keeping up-to-date with new technologies and acquiring news skills falls increasingly to the individual. That’s why I’m so pleased to be attending the course, assuming that it goes ahead. As we all know training is a “numbers game” and unless there’s sufficient student numbers to make a course economically viable, it’s liable to be canceled and re-scheduled. That can be a be a spanner in the works when it comes to preparing for exams where you may have a quarterly/half-year personal target to achieve. So my hidden agenda in writing this post is really to advertise the course I’m sitting in on, in the hope that others might join me. 🙂
The course is with Arrow ECS (I company I that used to be one of my customers ironically back when I was a freelance trainer. It’s taking place in London at their Royal Exchange location from the 26th to 29th of November. Come and Join me. You might end up being my lab partner (scare proposition I know, but you will soon find out how useless I am at RTFM’ing the manual.)