Note: This post has also been created in the German language.
About a month ago VMware has announced their new vExpert sub-program: vExpert Pro and I was honoured to become a representative for this programme within Germany.
What is goal of vExpert Pro Program and why did I participate?
The vExpert program has been created by VMware to as VMware’s global evangelism and advocacy program. In the end it’s a community of fellow virtualization experts, geeks who share their knowledge in form of tweets, blog-posts, speaking-engagements or other fancy formats.
Over the years this ‘small’ program has grown to more than 1000 members.
The vExpert Pro progam has been established by Valdecir Carvalho (aka homelabber brazil) to increase the number within specific regions. As in every community there are a few people that don’t like small/internal programs to grow, since with too much growth the exclusiveness of being a member of such a ‘club’ decreases.
I understand that argument and of course there is a risk that if the bar of becoming a vExpert get’s too low, the quality of such a program will lack. That argument is legit, but VMware needs to think on a global scale about that topic.
The key for success of a specific product, service, etc. quality and the knowledge about the items among the people. There are many ways to gain knowledge as an individuum (especially today) and to distribute knowledge.
I remember a quote of Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s CEO, during the VCI day at VMworld Las Vegas.
“I never want to loose a deal to a competitor again, just because people were not well educated enough on VMware products”
In well developed markets VMware’s education program is working fine to distribute knowledge. But fine is not enough. From my experience in field I assume that 99.9999% of people working with VMware have benefitted from blog posts other community members did. No matter how good a training program is, in the end the configuration combinations in the datacenter is so huge that things will occur that could never have been tested, ‘teached’ or documented before.
There are so many people out there (many of them vExperts) who share their experience, explain concepts, tell their story about learning things. That is what the vExpert community is all about. Giving incentives to do those things is part of VMware’s social media team.
vExpert Pro is focussing to motivate new people to share their knowledge.
- Where do I start?
- How do I start?
- What should I write about?
- How do I connect with people from the community?
- What if I don’t speak / write English good enough?
Those are things where my goal is to help people within the German area.
Becoming part of the #vCommunity has improved my professional career a lot with all of it’s benefits (monetary 🤑 and non-monetary 🙅♂️ ). I don’t hesitate to say that I am living a dream and I know that this would not be the case without the community.
Since I have been a vExpert I have improved in so many ways:
- Talking to unknown people
(Great skill at conferences. I was pretty shy in the early days) - Writing technical content
- Writing non-technical content
(When I finished school 12 years ago I was such a bad write. I don’t want to say I am good writer today, but at least it is much easier for me to get words into a written and understandable format) - learning by teaching
(Many of my blog posts were created about unknown topics) - leaving the comfort zone
The world is complex and gets even more complex every single day. Sharing knowledge is the only way of being able to deal with the complexity. When you give infos out to the community, the community will pay it back to you with a multiplier. Asking questions on twitter or slack gives you a suitable answer in 9 out of 10 times.
You want to know more about the #vExpert program? If you are at #VMworld this week in Barcelona, drop me a message and we can meet and have a chat over a coffee/beer.