Tag Born to learn

Join the Red Team and help us save lives! – No seriously, we’re doing this.. and we want you to be a part of it! The details below break it out!

I hope you can help us out I am a virtual pit crew member of the Red Team in the IT Grand Prix.  This is a competition being put on to raise awareness of Microsoft Learning, training, and Certification. Starting on May 31^st a ground team will be racing throughout the US to help local Charities solve their IT problems. The winning team gets to donate 10 000$ US to the charity of their choice.

Our team is racing for the charity NetHope. They work all over the world to help aid groups leverage technology on the ground better. This could include bringing in technical people to build network infrastructure, or providing training to locals so that they can continue to build and support technology that solves all sorts of problems.

This race has 2 components. We will be racing on the ground in each city. There are also online challenges. That’s where you come in. If you could register as a member of the Red Team’s virtual Pit crew on the website www.itgrandprix.com and help us out with some of the online challenges our team would really appreciate it!

You can help him by joining the “Team Red” pit crew at www.itgrandprix.com and selecting “Join The Race” to sign in and associate your Live ID with the team. It’s simple to do, fun to follow the exploits of the team and also do something good for yourself (flex some of that certified learning / exams / helping others muscle) as well as others. Make sure you associate the live id that is also associated with your Microsoft Certification!

Once you’re registered here’s how you can help right away!

Let your followers know all about the IT Grand Prix, ask them to sign up for the RED team! Next, complete online challenges!! You can start right now:

Challenge: Take a certification exam

Criteria: The team with the most MCP exams taken by their pit crew between May 1 and June 4, 2010 wins the challenge.

Action: Register with Prometric and take your exam by June 4, 2010. No other action required.

Challenge: Recruit friends and colleagues to join your pit crew

Criteria: Each certification held by each new pit crew member (though May 21, 2010) is worth points to your team.

Action: Recruit your friends and colleagues to join your pit crew by May 21, 2010

Challenge: Participate in Born to Learn Discussion Forums

Criteria: In the IT Grand Prix forum, your ground team will moderate discussion threads. Participate in those discussions and the team with the most relevant posts wins the challenge.

Action: Visit the ITGP forum, find your team’s threads ( your team color will be in the title), and participate in the discussion.

Challenge: Did you know you can track the number of times your VBC is viewed? Create and promote your Virtual Business Card to win this challenge.

Criteria: The team with the most cumulative views of their pit crew’s Virtual Business Cards wins.

Action: Create your VBC and share it. Make sure you have the VBC linked from our servers (image versions do not count)!

Challenge: Take the Are You Certifiable Challenge

Criteria: Play the Windows 7 track and the team with the highest cumulative score will win.

Action: Play Are You Certifiable, (make sure you login with the same Live ID you used to register for IT Grand Prix), and select the Windows 7 track.

Challenge: Update your newsletter subscription preferences

Criteria: We recently added the ability for you to choose how you want to receive your MCP or MCT newsletter: monthly, weekly, or even daily. The team with the most people who have updated or confirmed their subscription preferences wins. That’s it!

Action: Update or confirm your subscription preferences.

Update your MCP Flash newsletter preferences

Update your MCT Flash newsletter preferences

We also have a Facebook fan page where we will update you as we move throughout the challenge you can find here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/IT-Grand-Prix-Red-Team/118301818209916

If you want to find out more about NetHope check out www.nethope.org

Thanks so much for helping out! If you have any questions about this don’t hesitate to reach out!

Wait, what?! Yay?! That’s right! The Exchange 2010 exams will be hitting beta soon, and you can get first crack at testing it in the beta process – All it takes is clicking random links and updating your profile to reflect the fact that you’ve been playing with the 2010 bits!

Step 1. Visit this MSL Post to get the highlights (thanks Krista Wall!) Exchange 2010 beta exams coming soon—submit your SME profile now!

Step 2. Visit this second MSL Post in order to get the details about the SME Profile on connect! One word, rhymes with sneeze—Sign me up!

Step 3. Alright, I didn’t follow steps 1 or 2 because I don’t like clicking links so I want to go directly to setting up my SME Profile on Connect

• Visit the Connect Home Page
• Click on “Were you invited to join Connect?”
• Put this invitation code into the box: SME2-JC3G-DKDY
• Fill out the survey/profile
• You’re set and on your way to being the part of this beta and other future betas! Yay?!

So, the keys are in your hands – So step up and be a part of the future of the Exchange 2010 exams… or sit on the sidelines waiting until its released in final form in a million years!

Hey, you remember the bus! Well, the locations have been published! Which is especially great if you’re a number of destinations along the path you will want to hook up and meet the bus along the way!

• Milan, 26 Oct
• Zurich, 27 Oct
• Paris, 28 Oct
• London, 29 Oct
• Brussels, 30 Oct
• Amsterdam, 2 Nov
• Frankfurt, 3 Nov
• Munich, 4 Nov
• Vienna, 5 Nov
• Prague, 6 Nov
• Berlin, 9 Nov

Host a Career Express and/or a TechEd EMEA community event!

The best part of the tour are the local stops the Career Express makes at training partners and community events. On the Career Express USA tour in May, we stopped at a luau thrown by a partner, high schools, and colleges. What do you get when you host an event?

1) Company profile promoted on Get On The Bus Tour website

2) Event resources to facilitate local event in your area as part of Get On The Bus Tour stop

3) Increased visibility with TechEd EMEA registrants and/or attendees

4) Technical training on Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

If you would like to host a local event, we are taking applications until August 18. For more details, download the application form here: Bus Tour EMEA Event Application Form

Why yes, much of this was hijacked from Born to Learn, but hey! I had a lot invested in that trip and I equally want to see this one be successful! So get out there! Be a hosting location, or visit one of the hosting locations, it’ll be an experience unlike no other!

You’ve heard it here first! I’m not entirely sure just how founded that fact I’m proposing is, but take this into account:

Number of active MCTs: 15,251
Number of exams taken (ever) by those MCTs: 513,749
Average number of exams per MCT: 34
MCTs with 50+ exams: 2,682 (18%)
MCTs with 100+ exams: 82
Most exams taken by an MCT: 185 (OMFG!)

If you think about almost any other profession, you may find that you have a few people who are ‘interested’, but a majority of them fulfill the bare minimum in order to be successful in their field.   However in the world of Microsoft? We’re not only “interested” we’re downright passionate perhaps to the point of being almost overly obsessive ;)

Seriously! the bare requirements to be an MCT require you to have at least one MCP (So for any other profession, we’ll call that one certification or degree).  However, these masters of industry on average have 34 certifications under their belt, or in the case of one master –185!-

That’s just a major wow.  I’m not so sure we see this same kind of care taken in the Cisco space or any other industry (Imagine if Educators were this passionate, it would really convey to their students!)

I’d like to thank the Born to Learn blog for sharing this information!

So, you have to ask yourself: If I am not certified, why not?  There is no better time than the present, and no more viable reason if not to join the community of amazing MCT’s!

More information on how to become an MCT is located here.  The MCT is a accomplishment like no other!