WorkSpace One New Exam / Certification. What about Learning Challenges?

[jimish017]

Weekend Morning. A healthy cup of green tea &  Peace when no one is talking. (Trust me as a Technical Instructor, No talks is No less than a Zen Meditation)

But my IT passion & Love VMware, (alike my real life love), it also has a tendency to bombard me time to time with certain updates which sometimes could be best for a changeover and on a lot of occasions doesn't makes any sense to me.

So was this news, that VMware has launched 3 new ways to make task of WorkSpace One Instructors more tiring than ever. (In terms of explaining the certification paths) Follow below for an update;

Three New Ways To Show Off Your Workspace ONE Expertise - VMware Education Services

Why so skeptical on this? Why a daunting take ? Let's see where to begin with....

How about the most important part where instructors don't have a lab to test out the product according to the training courses?

No Seriously, What is it with VMware WS1? VMware training team probably thought let's make this product learning more challenging not to customers but to trainers who are going to deliver them. We as instructors have flexibility to book a prepkit for self learning for any (almost) course being in house apart from WS1 which makes delivery in real time more a tedious and tiring than as compared to any other VMware courses. No setup available, No on-request labs, No place to deploy and test features for advanced integration. (For testdrive portal, I will be there in a moment)

This being said, lets come on to the second point which makes learning for participants difficult.

THERE IS NOWHERE TO BEGIN FOR THIS PRODUCT. This I get from my participants and honestly to my belief they are right.

For any product, when its launched we talk about Deployment first and Administration later. It seems like lately, not only for WS1 for every other product VMware is focusing on How to Administer, Configure and Manage. (Even though training revenue, my opinion strictly, might be coming hugely from I.C.M. & Deploy Courses) and has completely forgotten and lost focus about Install and Deploy. It's good people are moving to cloud, talking about cloud, understanding about it but there is no real challenge (Sorry for my Inner role of Administrator to take over here for a bit). Let's be Honest here for a moment, you cannot become a doctor unless you know anatomy of a human body or the expertise over a certain part. Similarly it goes with an Implementation Engineers & Architects (Designer is too layman, sorry). This product specifically, gives you no idea how to move ahead with WS1 Deployment On-Premise or Hybrid.

I apologize for being an over thinker (Even my counselor is a tad bit frustrated with me from the last few sessions).

With my brunch ideas sloppily jogging inside my head, the third point which might irk a lot of my buddies out there. Dear  designers and Lab support team, please even if you find it hard to gulp it down, don't take it otherwise. Training on Demand Labs and setup is completely inefficient.

Instance 1 : One of my Participant is still struggling for his credentials from over a month now just because On Demand Lab didn't show 100 percent even after lab was completed.

Instance 2 : Another participant from some other session, finished all 4 parts of TOD yet course completion status is Incomplete.

Instance 3 : 4 out of 5 participants in a session were not able to redeem the bookshelf voucher provided with kits. Still haven't heard from VMware support team yet.

Instance 4 : The same lab setup which works for other participants will not work even after following all the steps in manual, thoroughly & word to word. There is no way to reset the lab.

Lab support team doesn't responds to any concerns or troubleshooting related to WS1. 

And the last thought on this account (I promise). WS1 opens up probabilities of management for various forms of digital devices from Rugged to SmartTV to Smartwatches to a normal SCCM managed Windows machine.

Please, no one wants to learn about vIDM or Horizon in their courses when they have heftily splurged for TOD or Classsroom course just to learn WS1 and it's features. It makes no sense to advertise products with half knowledge. When this product initially was overtaken as Airwatch idea was to showcase MDM, MAM & EMM. That certainly doesn't need vIDM or Horizon. even in WS1 prerequisite it nowhere says that it needs participants knowledge over IAM solutions or any Virtualization technology.

With this I would wind up the weekend rant of a WorkSpace One Instructor. Hopefully with my thoughts reaching out in community will give better result for my Weekend Detox (Yeah, dropped Lunch Plans. Feeling Lazy now.) 

P.S. - I am ardent fan of How WS1 is changing the management portfolio and How it can even allow an average Joey to manage it's household devices. Its just I don't find the current delivery system for this product very effective rather more of challenging to begin with and confusing in times (mostly).

Oh ! By the way, I will soon be posting about what can be done to overcome the above. So meanwhile just post your inputs and suggestions towards the above.