Professional Development Opportunities in 2008
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I ended 2007 with a flurry of activity. I participated in the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect Beta Exam for Java 1.5 during the final two months of the year and barely finished in time, mostly because of the compressed time requirement due to the beta status. I studied only two weeks, maybe 20 hours total. I found the test to be challenging and incorporated some different technologies and concepts. Although the test is brand new, it still feels like it was written 2 years ago. Passed Part One. Finished the project in 3 weeks. Took the essay exam the next week. Don't get the results until Feb 15th. I am assuming I passed.
During this time, I was also preparing for a company wide technical presentation on Spring 2.5. Knowing and understanding Spring is one thing, but trying to explain dependency injection and inversion of control to someone for the first time via a web conference is hard. I got some good feedback, especially from my colleagues up in the NYC office and I am looking forward to expanding the presentation soon.
So with all this activity at the end of the year, and after a refreshing Christmas break, I am ready to tackle some more opportunities. Here's my short list:
- ScrumMaster Certification. This one I actually started setting up last year. It's all set. I'll be attending the course, here in Houston, on February 13th and 14th, with Peter Borsella. I am stoked about this because we are having a company-wide technical conference 2 weeks later in Miami and I am hoping to be a part of the push for integration of Agile methodologies into consulting work, especially fixed-cost projects.
- Certified Associate of Project Management (CAPM), PMI - This is something I am targeting for Q2 of this year, after I return from my vacation in March. I am largely a technical kind-of-guy and I am wanting to round my experience more.
So after that, I am looking at Q3 and Q4 as a blank canvas as far as technology goes. What can I learn in six months? Should I go ahead and bite the Microsoft bullet, get cross trained in C# (which is basically Java, without the control) and become a player in the dark side? What about moving away from programming languages and moving toward Oracle and DBA-type knowledge?
Along the same lines, I am looking for more in-depth training and understanding of trading, hedging and other activities involving both financial and energy derivatives. I polished off the Nontechnical Guide to Trading Natural Gas which I enjoyed as it presented a majority of the hedging strategies for natural gas trading. I have a lot of experience in transportation services after having worked for Enron Transportation Services (Northern Natural Gas, Transwestern, and Florida Gas Transmission) as well as Spectra Energy, but have only been in natural gas (energy trading) for about six months, mostly on the risk side after an implementation of a risk product for a client in Indianapolis, in which I was the technical architect. For the next month, I am going to begin to research the free and company-sponsored avenues to becoming an expert in energy trading and will report when I make my decisions. If you have any suggestions regarding learning energy trading, please shoot me an email or leave a comment.