Enabling your IT Support teams to deploy the right technology to ensure your curricula is appropriate and suitable

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Over the past few weeks we have had a number of interesting meetings with IT Services teams and academic faculties within UK Universities. These discussions have been particular interesting as we have discussed the opportunity of enhancements academics can make to curriculum if they had access to the latest desktop OS and web browsers.

These discussions were particularly interesting as a number of the IT Services teams highlighted a need for applicants/employees with very specific Microsoft skills sets. For example. experience in virtualisation and cloud computing, as well as product specific skills such as System Centre, Windows 7 and MDOP. 

Microsoft has a number resources available including IT Pro resources such as TechNet and IT Developer resources such as MSDN. To the specific training and certifications resources Microsoft IT Academy programme as one route for institutions to help their staff and students get recognised certifications and knowledge.

Another service we discussed was, The Microsoft Virtual Academy, MVA is a online training centre which uses some of the characteristics of game-based learning to motivate learners. It’s free and open to anybody, not just those staff and students in formal education institutions, and it focuses on a range of Microsoft cloud-based technologies. 

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Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) is a fully cloud-based learning experience focusing on Microsoft Cloud Technologies. You can access a variety of training content online and become one of the renowned experts in the IT Pro community around the world. MVA provides its users with a virtual university experience: the student can select a track and study the material and then do the self-assessment. By doing so, they will collect points that will promote them to a Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum Level. Students on MVA can get access to all the information, statistics and advancements of their training career, allowing them to maintain a long-term relationship with Microsoft. Learning through MVA is FREE of charge, and you can study the contents at any time and at your own pace.

In the UK there are currently

9.1K

students registered

7.8K

self-assessments passed

85.5K

hours of training delivered

 

Topics covered include:

Clustering
Hyper-V
Office 365
Private Cloud
Public Cloud
Security
SQL Azure
System Center
Virtual Machine Manager
Virtualisation
Windows Azure
Windows Phone
VMWare

The whole system runs in the Cloud, as it’s built on Windows Azure so is extremely scalable and reliable. So let me know how you get on with these resources.