How to become a SharePoint Consultant - Industry Interviews

 By Edward Jones 

Today we speak to President and Senior SharePoint Consultant at vNext Solutions, Vlad Catrinescu. With more than 5 years experience analysing and deploying SharePoint Infrastructure, Vlad has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for SharePoint Server since 2013. He is currently the youngest SharePoint MVP in the world. 

Vlad is active on the SharePoint speaking circuit and is renowned for his Absolute SharePoint blog. He is the founder of SharePoint Community - the largest and most active SharePoint community on the web.

Find out how to become a SharePoint Consultant with Vlad in today's Industry Interview.

Profile

Name: Vlad Catrinescu
Job Title: SharePoint Consultant and President
Employer: vNext Solutions

Personal Blog: Absolute SharePoint
Social Media: LinkedIn | Twitter  
Awards: SharePoint Server MVP, Top 25 Office 365 Influencers 2015

Certifications:
- Microsoft MCSE: SharePoint 2013
- Microsoft MCSA: Office 365
- Microsoft MCSA: Windows Server 2012
- Microsoft MCITP: SharePoint 2010

Summarise your job in a sentence

I help companies get the most business value out of SharePoint by using the platform’s capabilities to the maximum, solving real business problems.

What does an average working day look like?

About 50% meetings where I try to understand the pain points of the business, and the rest where I try to solve them. 

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Working with SharePoint is always a challenge since every business has different needs, so every client is unique.  I enjoy meeting new people and by talking to business owners, and people from every department I get to make new connections every day.  

What are the biggest challenges in your current role?

SharePoint is at a big turning point right now, and with Office 365 and Hybrid, a lot of changes are coming. Getting clients used to SharePoint Online and Office 365 with all the new features it brings can be quite a challenge.

What career path did you take to bring you to your current job title?

I started out as a Junior Network Administrator, which allowed me to learn the Microsoft ecosystem.  Since I was working in a pretty small company, within a month I had Domain Admin rights and was playing with Lync, SharePoint, Exchange, AD, DNS , SCCM, SQL and more. 

This allowed me to have a much better understanding of how all the Microsoft Servers work together.  After, working as a SharePoint Consultant for a few companies, I set up my own SharePoint consultancy. 

Do you have/did you require any professional certifications to secure your current job title? If yes, which?

A lot of my clients require me to be certified in SharePoint, and I have my MCITP SharePoint 2010 and MCSE SharePoint 2013. Personally, I enjoy more the learning I have to do to get those certifications, and I think the learning you do to get them is worth a lot more than the title itself. 

What guidance would you give someone wanting to do your job?

Don’t only learn SharePoint, learn SQL, AD, DNS, and everything in the ecosystem, it will help you better understand how everything works together.  Also, be prepared to learn something new every day as Microsoft is pushing new features and changes to the cloud every two weeks, and since clients see you as the “Expert” you need to know what those changes are.

What guidance would you give someone starting their career in IT?

If you can, join a smaller company or a startup. You will be able to do multiple jobs, and see what you really love. In a big company, your roles and responsibilities are locked in. In a smaller company, you can help with Dev, IT, writing proposals, and taking care of the company twitter if you want to.

Has training and/or certification influenced your career? If yes, how?

For sure it did. I think that everyone who is in IT has to go through training a few times per year to learn new best practices and the new tools. Not only did the training help me get to the technical level that I am now, but being certified helped me open more doors. 

If you are certified, Microsoft Gold Partners will be looking for you. They need your certifications to keep their gold status. 

What are your thoughts on the widely reported IT skills gap and its impact on business?

There is a big IT Skills gap, because IT is evolving so fast that most IT Pro’s cannot keep up. However, that opens up a huge market for consultants, and people that are specialised on certain systems. 

What are your opinions on professional training and certification?

Training is very very very important in IT, since it keeps evolving every day. If you don’t keep training and learn new technologies, you will fall behind and your chances at getting a good job will go down.  

Also, let’s face it, new technologies are cool and doing projects on new technologies is a lot more fun than doing COBOL.  

Certification, well, unfortunately the reputation of IT Certification took a hit in the last few years due to the huge amount of illegal material out there. Whether you believe in the certification or not, I highly recommend you do the training as if you were going to do the exam. And in my opinion, paying that extra $150 to take an exam and be certified is worth it in the long run!