I currently spend my Saturdays studying for my CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management) and ITIL Certifications. The former is on project-based work which will be useful for development roles, and the latter is for IT support and focuses on IT operations.

CAPM

CAPM is a junior Project Management certification by the Project Management Institute, and tests knowledge of the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK), and does not require actual PM experience.

The gold standard in PM certification, the Project Management Professional, requires documented 4,500 hours of Project Management work which will be subject to audit. Because my colleagues in my previous PM work have left the company, there's no one to validate my experience. I instead opted for CAPM.

For this certification, I primarily use Rita Mulcahy's CAPM Exam Prep Third Edition, which I had to order from Amazon because I couldn't find this book anywhere locally. I also read Information Technology Project Management, Fourth Edition, by Kathy Shwalbe, as a supplement, and the official PM bible, A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge, Third Edition, of course.

I currently am about to start on the Quality Management chapter, having finished the chapters on Introduction, Project Lifecycle, PM Processes, Integration Management, Scope Management and Cost Management.

ITIL

ITIL stands for the IT Infrastructure Library, and the certification I'm going for, ITIL Foundation, covers foundation knowlege on ITIL Service Support and ITIL Service Management processes.

My current role is in technical support, so certified knowledge in ITIL is very important. For this, I use online training materials from Skillsoft.

I currently am on Configuration Management, having finished the Service Desk and Incident Management modules.

.Net

Aside from the 2 above study tracks, I am also continuing my SCSF activities. Having finished up to the Services portion of the lab, I am going to start working on a prototype project, and I chose it to be a Resume Builder software.

I currently am studying the HR-XML standard for resumes, and am currently looking at the Resume schema. I intend to try using a XSD to SQL tool, and then use NHibernate to help out in the data access portion of the code. I will be trying out XSD.EXE from VS 2005 if it can easily generate entity classes from these documents. (I have not yet started getting into the newly released ADO.NET Entity Framework of Microsoft, as I'd like to use .Net 2.0 as the foundation for my piece.)

posted by Jason at 10:13:19