In other words, it takes dedication — and if you’re not willing or able to be that dedicated, recognize it and move on to greener pastures. This simply isn’t your parents’ IT anymore (no matter how much my own mother insists it is, though I love her and respect the work she does), and you can’t even just get a few basic certs and find work, or even get a Bachelor’s Degree in just any old subject and then waltz into the field. To use my mother’s example again, she got her BA in Music Performance, and employers in the 80′s wanted a degree and a few classes, so she got into the field pretty easily. But that was then, and this is now; you just can’t do that anymore, because technology changes and grows at such a rapid pace these days that you could find yourself behind in the race in as little as a few months — hence, the constant cycle: study, test, repeat.

And it baffles me when I hear so many people I know with a decade or two of IT experience saying, “Well, I’ve been doing this for my whole career, so I don’t need any new certs.” And I want to ask them: Are you crazy? You have been paying attention at least a little bit to how quickly technology is changing these days, haven’t you? Hell — if we can go from blocky cell phones that are as big as my hand to sleek, tiny little things that also have Internet access and music and qwerty keyboards, all in the span of less than a decade, what on earth makes you think that system and server technologies wouldn’t develop at much the same speed?

It makes the tumor grow, I’m telling you.

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The majority of our track focused on the new features of SharePoint 2010 and how it interacts with Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2.