BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT

I had a meeting earlier this week with Lindsay Hamilton of the BCS, he has been recently appointed as the Regional Customer Manager for Qualifications in Scotland. 

Discussions centred generally around what the BCS could do for us as a consortium and what we as centres would want from them.  With this in mind I would be interested to hear of any ideas you may have.  Are there any particular reasons that are preventing you from undertaking or offering BCS qualifications in your centre? If there is anything you can think of related to this or BCS, please let me know and I can pass your ideas on. Their website for reference is www.bcs.org

I have agreed with Lindsay that I would support Centres implementation of the BCS qualifications similar to the way we support other vendor qualifications, which will be included in your ITPCS membership.  The finer points of this have to be decided but it will include onsite and offsite support, admin support and possibly discounts (as we are part of the consortium)

Lindsay has agreed to come and speak at the next ITPCS Event we have (which I have pencilled in for August) however if you would like to know more about this please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thanks

Iain

Iain Shand | ITPCS Manager | Cardonald College | ishand@cardonald.ac.uk | t. 0141 272 3297 | m. 07970 013968

MCT Renewal Reminder

The MCT 2012 program year is well underway, remember that each IT Academy has one free MCT voucher code and you are highly recommended to take advantage of this fantastic benefit.

You are kindly invited to either renew or enrol for your MCT status. Please note that the Microsoft MCT Program Renewal Tool is now open.

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We believe 2012 will be an exciting year. We will focus on offering you enhanced tools to help you stay informed, better ways to utilise your MCT benefits, and an improved platform to allow members to more effectively interact as a community. Being part of a large community – currently 19,000 MCTs in more than 150 countries! -- has always been a fantastic value in the MCT program; the MCT community is a vibrant community, made up of members always eager to share ideas and support each other. In the new program year, we will give you new and improved tools to help you meet, communicate, and collaborate.

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New style Microsoft Certification for Cloud Qualifications

Microsoft Learning have recently re-imagined and re-engineered their certification program to take into account Cloud qualifications. 

For the Cloud qualifications only, there will be a re-certification period of 3 years, this is due to the fact that Cloud qualifications do not align with a particular piece of software or operating system and as such there has to be a way of keeping the certification relevant.

Here is a video that explains the new certification track



Recording of the live event at Microsoft in Redmond on April 11, 2012, during which we unveiled and celebrated the reinvented Microsoft certification program with our Learning Partners, Certified Trainers and employees. For an overview of the new program, please visit: http://aka.ms/MSCerts