G’day,

I’m a big fan of maintaining and updating your technical skills, but sometimes its difficult to measure your ability at a task, especially if you don’t use that particular piece of a technology in your day job.

One good way of measuring these skills is to sit certifications and test your knowledge against a known baseline (the pass mark)

While certifications are in no way a replacement for on the job experience, I honestly think that having a good balance of certifications and experience is a really good thing.

Consequently, I’m always on the look out for things that can aid me on this path. If I see training for a certification and I think it might have some merit, I’ll usually check it out – even if I already have the certification, after all I can always pass that resource on to others in my team.

This morning, I seen that Microsoft are offering free Exam Cram sessions for a lot of MS certifications. These sessions will be hosted by current MVP’s – and there’s an SQL SERVER track in there. While these sessions are probably not going to help you to pass an exam that you’re not studied for, they may help point people in the right direction if they are considering doing a certification, or just help to solidify a little bit of knowledge if you are just about to sit a certification.

anyway, you can find the registration page here.

Good luck with the exams.

have a nice day.

cheers

Martin.