What is Microsoft Virtual Academy?

IT professionals are, for the most part, driven to best use technology to enable people from within the organization they support. To do so, system administrators, Infrastructure Specialists, Solutions Architects, etc, must keep their knowledge of IT best practices, solutions and tools current to ensure best efforts are always put forward to further enable organizations. IT professionals are a key component of an organization’s ability to grow, scale and in general become more successful and can only do so if provided with the essential resources needed.

So with that in mind, how does said IT professional advance his or her skills?

One said resource, which as an added bonus is completely free, is Microsoft Virtual Academy or MVA for short. Currently available in 11 different languages, MVA provides online virtual training led by Microsoft technical experts to help knowledgeable IT professionals learn the latest technology, build their skills, and advance their careers.

Hosted entirely on Microsoft Azure, MVA offers both self paced online courses as well as Microsoft Technical Expert led live events entitled Jump Start training where you can interact with the expert as well as a worldwide audience of learners from around the world. Other subject matter experts also attend said jump starts to assist in answering questions posed in real time chat sessions. This enables IT professionals to get the answers they need swiftly to later apply what they have learned.

Microsoft Virtual Academy, at time of publishing of this post, currently educates 42,000 Canadians amidst the 2.2 million IT professionals world wide and that number is rapidly increasing. Currently providing courses on everything from Hybrid Cloud Best Practices to Migrating Legacy Servers to Windows Server 2012 R2, MVA is a great resource enabling IT professionals looking to evaluate, deploy, administer, update, and manage infrastructure in their organization.

To get started, simply sign in with your Windows Live ID and complete the registration page. A confirmation email is then sent to the email account supplied during registration. Once confirmed the new MVA account is created and the learning can commence.