Today I completed my second IBM Websphere Application Server course. The course's topic was the advanced administration of IBM's Application-Server. Regretful I have to say that I didn't learned anything new L. The course's content was almost the same as in the basic course but this time we had only three days instead of four and three days were not enough to include all chapters and units.
The only two big differences were that the lecturer of this course was much better in performing the units. I really believe that he was, or better, he is a professional WAS administrator and also his presentation style was very enjoyable. He didn't read off the slides all the time and he also spoke about things which the lecture-slides didn't cover.
The second thing was the lecture's course environment: we worked remote over Citrix on VMWare images which were provided on workstations in Atlanta, yes in Atlanta ;-). Each student had to work on three workstations (Win XP, 2 Linux (Fedora)). This time IBM really tried to create a real-time-scenario where you have installed different os-versions on different workstations. The fact that we also had two Linux-workstations didn't really help us. We had a lot of troubles creating a cluster because of different user-rights. The Linux-workstations were our two cluster-members and on the dev-workstation (WinXP) our Deployment Manager was installed.
But I don't want to get too detailed here. Maybe if I have more time in my university-holidays to post a few things about the environment and my experiences with Citrix and the remote-workstations. Today I had the chance to ask the lecture about his job and how somebody can become an IBM-"Consultant". He told me a lot about Java- and IBM-Certificates and how difficult it is to get them or better how difficult it is to pass the corresponding exams.
After this talk I really acquired a taste of becoming an IBM-Consultant because I really like the fact to travel around and teach about very cool technologies (not only IBM or Rational products) but also about Java and Open-Source technologies and if you don't have to teach any courses you have to learn to get new certificates and that is really cool but we will see what will happen because right now I'm really, really happy with my current job. In the end my Course-Certificate ;-)
Cheers
