Career

I am blessed to be working for a great employer, and while COVID had a significant impact everywhere, from a work point of view, I have never been busier.

Because we are growing as an organisation, opportunities are surfacing on a regular basis.

My focus in the last 24 months has shifted from a more project to project focus to now being involved in several projects at once providing project and architectural governance as well as normal consultant duties. This has been challenging but really enjoyable. This means often I am not in the technical “weeds”, and exercising new skills and leaning on past experience.

Having not sat any VMware exams recently (MSC exam not including) I had to update my VMware certification status and therefore sit the VCP exam.

The VCP-DCV 2021 certification validates candidate skills to implement, manage, and troubleshoot a vSphere infrastructure, using best practices to provide a powerful, flexible, and secure foundation for business agility that can accelerate the transformation to cloud computing.

Being a Consultant within a VMware Principal Partner there are standards we need to meet and preferably exceed.

Master Services Competencies (MSCs) are VMware partner designations designed to recognize services-capable partners with delivery expertise and experience within a VMware solution area.

With that in mind I sat the VCF Specialist exam.

The Exam

The exam covers a broad spectrum of VMware technologies (vSphere, NSX-T, vSAN, Tanzu) I was apprehensive about it as there is an awful lot of material to cover that the exam expects you to have good knowledge of. You have 130 minutes to work through 72 question It is available as a remote-proctored exam, and requires a score of 300 or more to pass.

Since I started learning Kubernetes the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam has been a target for me, but it’s always seemed to be out of reach. The whole Kubernetes ecosystem is a vast and nebulous beast, with new projects rising to the fore all the time, and old projects fading from favour. The size and rapid development that make the field so interesting and powerful, are the same properties that make the learning curve so steep, and the entry bar so high.

I’ve had the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist exam booked for a long time - so long in fact that the exam voucher was due to expire at the end of January 2022! I figured I’d give it a go right at the start of January, work out how far off the mark I was and then aim to do the free retake before it expired at the end of the month.

So it being 2020 now I thought it would be a pleasant exercise to quickly glance over the previous ten years and reflect a little. Before I even begin I will say I have never been happier in my career and work/life balance (which is always an on going effort to keep appropriate)

I am going to break it down in a yearly format and then summarize at the end.

Autumn seems to be a time for the winds of change to blow through our industry, and this year that’s true for me.

TL;DR - I’m leaving VMware PSO to join the Cloud Management Business Unit as a Technical Marketing Manager for Cloud Automation!

It’s been a little over two years since I joined VMware as a Senior Conusltant in the EMEA NSX Practice, and in that time I’ve enjoyed some great opportunities, worked with some great people and technologies. And I’ve learned a lot since taking on my first NSX-T design just days after joining. But, as I mentioned when I joined a couple of years ago , I’ve always said NSX comes alive when it’s automated by vRA. In fact, almost every engagement I’ve done over the past two years has had a strong vein of automation running through it.

It has been a few years since I read (and lost) a great article on career progression and personal insight. That article helped me relax into who I am from a professional point of view, but it also challenged me.

I have been in IT for over 20 years now and in truth the first 10 years were not so great (perhaps a story for another time) but it was when I stumbled upon the vCommunity by way of Twitter and then subsequently I attended my first VMUG (in London) which completely challenged and changed my way of thinking and approach to my career. Talking to and observing peers whom I respected gave me a lot of inspiration to re-evaluate what I was doing in my career, why I did what I was doing and perhaps most importantly of all was I really being the best I can be?

Upon seeing others in the wider community making a blog post like this as a marker in the sand I thought I would follow suit as a way to see what I have learned and goals I would like to achieve in the coming year. 2017 was a good year and a very busy one at that, I got to see a lot of new places on my work travels and met some really amazing, clever and talented people.

Why do IT projects fail?

I am sure if you ask that question to ten people you will get 10 different answers, or at the very least a wide variety of reasons. The product chosen to deliver the solution was a poor match, the product was implemented incorrectly, the PM sucked, the Vendor gave no support, insufficient training material/resources, poor interoperability, the list goes on and on.

One issue I have observed from time to time on my travels is quite different from the above listed examples. In fact, (and this is my personal observation and opinion) the real issue can be hidden under the reasons listed above.