How VMware Certifications changed my life

Manny’s latest post really hit home for me, so I thought I would write one describing how VMware certification changed my life too! 

I remember standing in New York at the end of 2013 looking at a poster in the subway, thinking “man, that’s the future”. It was a VMware poster, and although I had worked with VMware all that year (and a little bit in 2012), that’s when it really hit me.

I was in the US for a 6-week project, delivering thousands of desktops (with the help of good ol’ SCCM) for a FTSE 100 company. With me, a fellow consultant and a project manager. It was one of the best projects of my life – despite being 40 days of non-stop work and only 2 days of sightseeing.

Virtualisation was already a thing, but this was in the days when not all businesses had adopted it. It was an easy time, when going to a meeting and finding a potential customer running physical workloads was almost a guaranteed win (provided you knew what you were doing, of course!). Cue VMware certification. Being a VCP in those days was a guaranteed money-maker.

I had just accepted a new job after being head hunted, and decided that this was the time to get VMware certified. I lumped up the cash myself for the course and the exam, and got stuck in. Getting certified was easily one of the best moments of my career to date. Along with the obvious bump up in pay rate, it opened a huge number of doors. I would say that 75% of what makes VMware certification so amazing, is the community that goes with it. The VMware community is by far the best going. I’ve never known such a welcoming, helpful bunch of people in my entire life. This is the reason so many of us are pushed to do better every day; talk at that event, hop onto that podcast, start that blog, do that exam!

The community is an opportunity to unlock skills that you would never have the chance to develop otherwise

So in summary, it has:

• Opened up doors that previously would have been closed
• Taught me things I wouldn’t have known just “using” the technology
• Increased my confidence, both outwardly and inwardly (yes, impostor syndrome is real and it’s brutal!)
• And, of course, increased my day / week / year rate!

This blog was formed thanks to that very community, when one day, we decided that we should just pool our knowledge into one place. The irony is not lost on us that that is the very principle of virtualisation!

VMware isn’t paying me to say this, by the way. But I still believe that VMware has a place, and will always have a place, because the future is hybrid.

A lot of people disagree with me when I say that now is still a good time to become a VCP.

Why though? The cloud is not going anywhere, and is only going to get bigger, sure, there’s no doubt about that. However, the cloud is built on the exact same principles as virtualisation. You’ll be in a much stronger position if you understand the infrastructure layer (compute, network, storage) and cloud than someone who only understands cloud, because… the future is hybrid.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Microsoft Hyper-V. It’s going from strength to strength and this post is not intended to be a vs comparison of the two.

But, becoming a VCP was a game-changer, and will always be a huge milestone when I look back at my career.