Staying up to date and current in IT work and IT specializations is important. Things are always changing, and vendors are always introducing both new products and new paths to certification on their new products.

If you are paying for your own training and certifications, one great resource you should check out is Stanly Community College’s IT Academy. Through their IT Academy, they offering professional level training at an affordable community college price. Depending on what your looking to learn, you should take a look at what Stanly CC is offering. Stanly CC has partnerships with some big vendors in the IT space and offers online courses that will satisfy the classroom portion on your path to various certifications.

I recently have had some personal experience with Stanly CC. I haven taken two of their VMware courses; “Install, Configure, Manage – vSphere 6.7” and “Optimize and Scale – vSphere 6.7”. The courses themselves were pretty well done. Lots of in-depth videos that dived into the intricacies of vSphere environment and ESXi. They also had lots of really great labs to work through that corresponded to the videos. The hands-on labs, IMHO, were the best part. They really provided the chance to “get your hands dirty” and actually set up things like a VDS switch, configuring tag based storage policies, or running esxtop to determine which virtual machines were experiencing resource contention; just to name a few of the labs.

Overall, I was happy having gone the Stanly CC route. The skills that I learned there definitely helped me towards passing my exams and earning my VMware VCP-DCV certification. I give them a solid recommendation in terms of improving skill sets and advancing your technical knowledge.