Making It in IT: Call Out for Exam Voucher Contest Ideas

By Ed Tittel March 6, 2012 12:45 PM

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Ed Tittel to profile winners of Tom's IT Pro's Microsoft IT exam voucher contest over next couple of months.

Dear Readers:

I’ve now managed to confer MCP vouchers on all the winners of our contest with one modestly strange and slightly embarrassing twist: when I counted out the winners, even though I had only 9 vouchers to give away, I named 10 winners: my mistake, to be sure, and nobody else’s. But hat in hand, I went to my Microsoft contact, the wonderful and generous Lorna White, who graciously conferred an additional voucher upon me so that I could give one to ALL of the winners without having to cut somebody out. What a relief that proved to be, and what a way to earn my eternal gratitude and thanks.

Over the next couple of months I’ll be interviewing the winners to report on them, their backgrounds, current jobs, and future aspirations. This should make for some interesting reading, and give everybody a chance to experience multiple and typical slices of “life in IT” where certification plays a role. I can only hope you’ll all find this as interesting to read about as I always find this kind of thing to be to learn about and document.

In the relatively near future (I’m up to 3 of 10 responses from the winners so far) I’ll post a blog with all of their photos and capsule summaries about them. Then, I’ll follow up with interviews from time to time to catch you up on who those winners are, what they do for a living, and what they plan to do with their exam vouchers in the 14 weeks that remain before those vouchers expire.

For your own part, if you’d like me to approach other cert sponsors to see if I can get more exam vouchers, please share your suggestions with me. I have to believe that both CompTIA and Cisco would be of great interest to the Tom’s IT Pro readership. Anybody else? Please let me know.

Best wishes to everyone, especially to the 70 readers who took the time out to fill out applications for this last contest. With a little luck, this is something we’ll be able to offer our readers here on the site on occasional, if not even regular, intervals.

Best wishes,

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems.

E-mail Ed at etittel@tomsitpro.com with your request for IT certification or career info, or your ideas for future blogs. If your e-mail leads him to a blog topic, he’ll have the Tom’s staff send you your very own Tom’s IT Pro t-shirt! Be the envy of your friends and colleagues, and help him help you with your IT career!