Before the verification exam becomes available to the public, I need ONE OR TWO people to be the first through the complete program. This is not a “beta;” the exam is finalized and you will have to pay for your verification. The first one or two people will be semi-automated as I nail down the final payment integration bits, and then we’ll throw it open to the public.
If you’re interested, contact me at don at Concentrated Tech.
NOTE: As of 4th February, we’re full up for the beta. Check back later this year for the program launch.
I’m ready to begin a formal beta test of the new VERIFIED EFFECTIVEâ„¢ examination program, which we’d previously referred to as “PowerShell Verified.”
Participation in the beta will be free, and if you pass it “counts.” If you’re interested, please download the Program Guide before February 10th, 2013. You must agree to perform you examination on February 11th or 12th .
As I write this, we’re down to one ticket for the PowerShell Summit North America 2013. So what do you do if you really wanted to go, but miss that last, golden ticket?
Cry a Little Let’s face it, this was totally avoidable. It’s probably your boss’ fault for not approving the expense, and so some subtle retribution may be in order. Burn the coffee for a week. Reboot domain controllers randomly.
A long time ago… about a year, in fact… Jason Helmick and I started talking about a community-owned PowerShell “certification.” It went nowhere. Well, not very far. Some background on exams: Microsoft, in my opinion, will never do a PowerShell cert. I say this having been part owner of a company that did outsourced exam development for the company. The deal is that Microsoft tries to certify _job tasks, _not _tools. _Nobody (well, maybe me) wakes up thinking, “gonna do me some PowerShell today.” No, PowerShell is the means to an end: “gonna automate me some user creation today” is more likely. And Microsoft tries to certify that end. PowerShell’s an important tool, and it already shows up on certification exams here and there. For the most part, I agree with Microsoft’s reasoning, there. The argument can be summarized as saying “bosses don’t hire IT pros based on their ability to operate a low-level tool, they hire them to perform job tasks, which encompasses the tool.” Except that, in the case of PowerShell, I think it’d be tremendously useful for an employer to use PowerShell expertise as a discriminating factor in hiring. I mean, “someone who can automate stuff” is more valuable than “someone who can only do stuff manually,” in any situation. So “PowerShell Verified” was intended to be a way for someone to prove - at least to themselves - that they’ve taken their PowerShell skills _to the minimum level necessary to be an effective automator. _Not a guru. Not an expert. Not Poshoholic. _Minimally effective, _who could then grow from there with experience. So that’s what I’m going to put together. I want to explain why I’m not using the word “Certification,” though. In my mind, certifications come from, mainly, first-parties like Microsoft. Microsoft has to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure their exam content is accurate, legally defensible, blah blah blah. They worry about security, brain dumps, and other stuff that diminishes the value of the certification. I don’t have that kind of bandwidth or their resources, so in many ways my little program will be less effective than a “real” certification. Plus, few bosses will give a rat’s patooty what that Don Jones guy said about your skillz (I can’t even convince bosses to buy you guys 12-core 64GB workstations for your desk). So my “Verified” program is going to be _low stakes, _meaning you take it to prove something to _
yourself
_. Here’s how this is going to go.
What’s the average tech conference cost these days? $1500? $2000? And that’s just to get in, to say nothing of hotel, air, food, and whatnot.
The PowerShell Summit North America 2013 has an idea. Lets do a community-owned event, with a goal of breaking even and supporting an annual event, but not worry about a profit.
Lets say you live in the US. A ticket to Seattle in April will run you $500-700 after taxes.
When Kirk Munro and I set this site up, and started redirecting traffic from the old PowerShellCommunity.org, one of our main goals was to make this a truly community-owned resource. We wanted it hosted independently (my company, Concentrated Tech, is being paid to host the site, so we get pretty good service and total control). We didn’t want to be beholden to anyone’s commercial interests or whims (companies do get distracted by their real jobs from time to time, after all).
That’s right, for just $400 you can guarantee yourself a seat at the PowerShell Summit North America 2013, to be held at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA. Just 10 tickets will be made available at this low-low-low price, which is $150 off the normal registration rate.
Why so low? Why are they called “I’m Feeling Lucky” tickets? Because while we’re committed to an April 2013 date, we haven’t actually locked in dates with Microsoft, yet.
We’re looking for a few good PowerShell contributors! You don’t need to be a PowerShell expert in order to make a valuable contribution to this community - there are a number of ways in which you can help.
Welcome to the new community! This site represents an evolution of the old PowerShellCommunity.org (also accessible at PoshComm.org). We’ve moved the site off of the old DotNetNuke software, and are now using a combination of WordPress (for community-hosted blogs) and Vanilla 2 (for the forums and for blog comments). Why the new site? A couple of reasons. For one, we desperately wanted to get out of the DotNetNuke software, which has proven somewhat difficult to work with since none of us are experts with it. We also needed to get the site out of it’s home in a Quest datacenter. Quest was awesome for providing that hosting, but they’re moving on to bigger and better things, and we wanted to get a bit more control over the site. We also wanted to trim the site down a bit, to focus mainly on providing a blogging platform and aggregation point, and the all-important Q&A forums that folks rely on.