Learning at Work Week

  • Article

We know as well as you do that continuous learning is essential for any IT Pro or Developer to climb the career ladder, or even keep up to date in an existing role! That's why when we heard about “Learning at Work Week”, we couldn't help but jump at the opportunity to share with you some top learning resources from the Microsoft world and beyond.

So what is Learning at Work Week?

Learning at Work Week, run by the Campaign for Learning, aims to put the spotlight on the importance and benefits of learning and development within the work place. With this in mind, starting today and continuing every day this week, we will provide you with some great articles from our very own Technical Evangelists about how they learn and where they go to learn, as well as lots of other fab resources to help you be successful with your learning.

But that's just half the story. We want to find out what you, the UK tech community, think about the importance of learning. Do you find time in the workplace, or is it an extra curricular activity? What are your go-to websites? Don't worry, we won't be offended if they're not ours! Keep on scrolling to find out how you can win some great SWAG just for sharing your experience with your peers.

"Working in IT and not embracing continual learning is a bit like driving a car and not filling up. You'll end up coming to a juddering halt. And quite quickly." - Peter Bryant

Make sure you keep your eye on the @TechNetUK and @MsDevUK Twitter channels to discover all the great resources we will be highlighting this week!

How can you get involved? There’s plenty of ways you can get involved. Firstly, why don’t you start a new course this week? You could head over to the Microsoft Virtual Academy for example and browse through the thousands of free online courses available to you there.

"The days of classroom learning are gone, technology changes at such a rapid rate to keep courses fresh. With MVA the latest technology is there for me to learn in bite size chunks when I am on the road." - Jamie Bryant

Secondly, we’d love to hear from you about how you learn and where you go to learn! To kick start this we are opening up a competition…

It’s competition time!

If you are an IT Pro, tell us in no more than 500 words how you learn and where you go to learn at work. You’re all specialists in different fields and we want to know where you go to discover great learning material.

Are you an Exchange Expert who has recently moved to Exchange Online… How did you make the leap and where did you go to get skilled up?

To enter the competition all you need to do is email your article in a Word document to the UKITPro@microsoft.com email address using the correct subject line.

Please use the subject line:

  • Learning at Work Week

A rule will be used on these subject lines to put the emails into the competition folder so it’s important that you get these correct otherwise your entry won’t be counted.

We will have a panel of judges who will be choosing two IT Pro winners to receive a bundle of great prizes worth over £100, as well as the opportunity for your entry to feature in this month’s newsletter so that others can learn from your experience.

The judging criteria includes:

  • Adherence to the 500 word maximum limit
  • Originality of entry
  • Effective articulation of your methods of learning
  • One entry per person – only the first entry will be counted.

Now you heard me mention prizes, well these include:

We will accept the use of images in the article, actually we encourage it and they won’t affect the word count.

You have one week to enter, the deadline is 11.59pm on 25th of May. T&C's apply.

Resources

It would be great to hear about what you go to learn so do let us know if the comments section or via @TechNetUK.