In the past weeks I didn’t had much time to complete my learning courses because I was so busy with the projects I had to work on. Today was learning day, and I completed about a dozen online courses to get back on track. I still have quite a few to go, but if I keep up this pace, I’ll be done by the end of the week, and if all goes well by then I’ll be the lucky owner of a pack of Office Ultimate disks to install on the Vaio laptops so I can make the sysprep and install the ten laptops to have them shipped to the selected influential bloggers across Europe.
Courses of today:
How To Use The Roadmap / I had to refresh this to get the most of it. :) Didn’t take too long fortunately.
Getting Set Up / My basic set up tasks as a new Microsoft employee. Pretty important to know. Printed out the checklist to fall back on later.
Understanding Microsoft / Did the training before, but forgot to archive it and add it to the roleguide… So had to do it again. Nothing changed. It’s a course where you get to see and hear from Microsoft top executives; you have to complete this online training to understand how your job is affected by Microsoft’s mission, vision, history, organization, competitive pressures, and product life cycles, among other things. For every of the 7 business units you get to see who the competitors are, which is good to know. I only knew a few, the major players. Now I know them all. :) This course came with a really wicked video I just had to upload. It’s a great example of how you’re being pushed to deliver the best you’ve got. This video is the answer to my ‘Why Microsoft’ question. It doesn’t contain secret info, it’s just a great moral booster. I loved it.
Welcome to DPE / DPE, Developer Platform Evangelism, is where I fit in as an Enthusiast Evangelist. I’m not a technical guy, and I’m not a developer, but I love to learn how things work and I love to talk with the people who make it work. My job is to tell the world a little bit more about the products that are being released or have been released, to talk to the people behind the screens and to bridge the gap between the product and the consumer with an experience, an event or useful information. This course featured a video by Jon Beighle, Director of D&PE. It helped me discover the mission, value, and goals of the Enterprise Partner Group.
EveryDay Productivity / A course to preview my role within the organization. To help me find out where I fit in and to review my job description, commitments, deliverables and tasks. I still have to get my commitments lined up. I’ll have to get to that this week. Let’s say, before Thursday. That would be cool.
Finding Information At Microsoft / A short guide that provides you the tools and process for finding all kinds of information on the Microsoft intranet. There’s a gazillion http://project links on the intranet. Every product, every team, every single activity has its own place. You just have to figure out where and how. I printed the list, it’s 3 A4 pages long. All URLs and its not even close to complete, it’s just to ‘get you started’. I’ll be old and grey by the time I’ve checked all these locations. The coolest ones are obviously the ones where you can find demos and presentations. I think I’ll spend my lunchtime checking out a few every day and then when I like the content, I’ll subscribe to the team alias so I get notified of new thingies as soon as they’re out.
Your Security At Microsoft / Already did this back in December, but didn’t add it to the roleguide, so I had to do it again as well, just for the record. It’s an important course where Corporate IT and Physical Security have partnered to develop this general security awareness e-learning class. It goes over basic Physical Security best practices and IT Security policies to protect you, your property and company assets. It covers all areas from preventing tailgaters that follow you inside the secured areas of the building to tips for travelling and password creation. I learned quite some handy rules to create solid 10-digit passwords, but besides the cool travel tips, it’s mostly common sense.
The last one I did today was Peer Mentor Overview / this Peer Mentor training offers practical tools to help new employees (as well as their Peer Mentors) to communicate effectively, to transfer knowledge efficiently, to set learning goals, to understand learning styles, and manage their Peer Mentoring partnerships. My mentor is David Boschmans. We get along pretty good. It’s great to have someone to turn to when you have some small questions or issues to deal with, especially when there’s so much to learn and remember. I guess this is a course that doesn’t really end.
Tomorrow I’ll do another load of courses. It’ll be fun :)
