The sudden and sad demise of the #sqlmcm program had me thinking on many levels..particularly on future goals and aspirations, and on how to market myself.
To give an introduction of some sort – in my younger years I was not particularly in favor of degrees or certifications. I was strongly of the belief that experience, interest to learn and creativity were the ‘real’ stuff that got you places. I dropped out of a high tech engineering program where I was 1 out of 300 people selected from among nearly 60,000 people who took it, and chose to pursue my life and career based on what I believed I had – interest in technology, creativity and hard work. Needless to say, it was not an easy journey. Particularly in a country like India where degrees and certifications were almost a cultural obsession. After a few years of working poorly paid jobs I went back to school for my masters. My masters degree and the process of doing it taught me many positive things. One, that having a hard goal – such as an exam or someone to rate me gave me better focus than learning on my own. Two, degrees helped you get through visas and other places where you do not have personal interaction with whoever is handling your stuff, and three, it helped you find community among others who had similar degrees. I never went crazy about degrees or certifications, but I did learn their place in the world, the hard way.
In the sql server world, there are many paths to progress. The most common one, by far, is by speaking/blogging/becoming a technical evangelist. There are many without MCM who have gone this way and been remarkably successful. But speaking and blogging unfortunately are not everybody’s goal nor does everyone have the time needed for it. To me – as someone who has a lot of food allergies, travelling intensively is really not a good goal to have. I have tried blogging but my time for it is rather limited and also not had success coming up with something creative to write about, I guess again that needs a lot of experimentation. That is part of the reason I picked the MCM as a possible goal. I was also interested in being differentiated from the average brain dump MCITP down the street by getting to be an MCM – and I did find this a worthy goal. Even saying you are pursuing an MCM at an interview got a lot of appreciative nods and interest. It also got employers to pay for good training programs such as those offered by #sqlskills, which they otherwise would not understand the value of.
Now with that certification gone we are back to the world where there is really not much by way of proof to tell an average employer how different you are from brain dump MCITPs. If you are like me into doing community work such as organizing sql Saturdays or running user groups you may want to use that to some extent but not everyone is highly impressed by community work to hire you, or even give you pointers to jobs (including people in the community itself). And to many of us it is not just about career growth or progress, it is also about acceptance among people you respect and acknowledge.
There is a scene in one of my favorite movies ‘A Beautiful Mind’ – where Professor John Nash – played by Russell Crowe, gets accepted and acknowledged for his intelligence after a nobel nomination. The other professors walk over slowly to him and hand him pens as a token of their respect and his acceptance into their club. I have a pen with the ‘Microsoft certified master’ printed on it – a little gift from the #sqlskills class I attended some years ago. It was my goal and the goal of many others I know to be accepted like John Nash was into the elite #mcm community. It is a sad day to have that taken away from us. It is my sincere hope and wish that all of us will find bigger and better goals to pursue.
Curious..about data 