Jason and I attended a Sitecore training class in Mill Valley, California April 22nd and 23rd. Jason had already built a comprehensive website for Wasatch Funds: https://secure.wasatchfunds.com/ and he said he learned a few things particularly related the Placeholder Settings. I was new to Sitecore. I did the pre-training “A very Simple Website” project and took the pre-training test – and passed. Building the simple website was valuable preparation for the class. They send you all the student training material and the instructor training material ahead of time, so I read through all of that.
The class was very well done. I really liked the way they would build a Web Control or Sublayout and apply it to sitecore, then have you basically redo the same exercise. It is differnet having to do it yourself even if the instructor just did the module. I feel like I learned all the fundamentals to build a website using Sitecore. I also have an expert in Jason that can help if I run into trouble.
After taking the training and truely understanding what Sitecore does, I believe this CMS is one of the best in class because of its flexibility, extensability, and especially the ability to edit the content by business users directly on the site. This means to me, as a developer, that I do not have to write editors and other admin tools for the content authors to manage their own sites. Big benefit and time saving during development.
All in all, it was fun, the food was good, the instructor was excellent, and we met a number of other developers preparing for Sitecore development. If you think you want to be a Sitecore developer I would encourage you to take this class. It will speed your learning and teach you the basics you need to get started.
Anyone tried the latest developer course for sitecore 6.2. The course was very good and I learned a lot. However the exam was hard compared to the V6.0 and a large majority of the people failed the course.
The trainer at the end admitted that they have changed the exam in 6.2 to be harder. But in doing so they have over cooked it. Anyone else had a similar experience? Feeling like a guinea pig and extremely frustrated
We haven’t taken the new test. Bummer about the difficulty. I think some people failed the one we took as well, so don’t be too hard on yourself
Yes, I also felt like a guinea pig and very frustrated with the test.
Did the 6.2 Training last week, it was so difficult that I was surprised when I just scraped a pass.
The trainer said that a lot of people failed and it almost caught some of the trainers out when they took it!
Hey.
I did the 6.4 training last week.
It was difficult, and it wasn’t only me!! People were complaining.
I found it difficult, because you just can’t remember everything in 2 days, and you don’t have the time to browse the books.
I actually wrote a post and copied the question I got wrong. It could give an idea of what should be expected if you plan to do the certification:
http://blog.vincentbrouillet.com/post/2011/01/23/Sitecore%2C-WCMS%2C-the-certification-program
Let me know what you think.
Thanks for the heads up. I guess if you are certified, then you are in more exclusive company!
I just took the training and missed passing by 1 question. I’ll retake in a few days. Has anyone else posted the questions they missed, as Vincent did?
I took the foundations, developer, and prototyping courses in mill valley last year. I was very disappointed with the classes as they were just a bunch of fast paced powerpoint style presentations. There’s just no way you can learn this product through those classes.
I failed the exam the first try but took it again later and passed. However, I’m still learning and while the product itself seems to be very good there is a sorry lack of well written and organized documentation.
If anyone has any specific questions or would like to know more about the exam or training I’ll try to help.
Thomas,
I am taking this exam. Was your 2nd test similar to first one?
6 Developers including myself have just sat through the foundation course in London, then the Website .NET Developer Training I managed to fail both exams due to the speed, the Power Point style of teaching at the same time showing you at least 6 differnet ways to do the same thing.
The Website .NET Developer Training exam 50% passed or 3 out of the 6 of us passed with only the lowest amount for a pass 28 points.
So coming out of it we’re all putting a word document together with all the correct answers to enable a quick search for the question in a hope the remaining 3 of us can scrape a pass. as searching the Doc, SDN, Google proved useless, but thanks to Vincent B post we found a couple of answers cheers Vincent we owe you a Beer
Our Opinion the training was far to intence, and could have focused more on developing a SiteCore site in visual studio using their plugin, Instead of constently swapping to 4 differnet environments to do various things that could have been done in one, then once you’ve mastered that showed other ways to do it.
We’ve had to sit in a meeting with our bosses to explain to our company that spending £485 per day for training excluding hotels, food and travel, that we’ll not be able to build a site in SiteCore without spending the next 6 months re-reading the training materials and working out ourself which is the best approach.
The Prototyping at the end was a Joke, we where put in teams of 2 and given tasks to which the Instructor said he’d be amazed if anyone finished one! speak volumens on thier training approach.
It took my team 2 guys with over 20 year web development behind us 6 hours to get the footer area to display some text and a Image, something I could do in most CMS’s in about 6 minutes. If training had been actual training then I think we might have had a fighting chance.
I’ll let you know of the out come of the test, But looking at SiteCore I think there is better solutions on the market and with better training.. I doubt after this project we have to build using SC we’ll never use the product again!!
I just attended the Sitecore CMS 6.4 Developer training and was thoroughly impressed with the experience.
My instructor was superb and the materials were fantastic. And, I passed the exam easily with a score of 85%. It was open book after all
Sure, there were tons to cover in just three days, but if anything, I found the materials to be purposely repetitive. In fact, I wanted more demonstration, slides, and student exercises! I’m the type of person, however, that would rather have too much than not enough.
In order to justify my time away from a project, I needed the training to not only cover the key concepts and terms, but also show me hints of the possible. And that’s exactly what I felt I got from my Sitecore training!
Of course, I know a couple of colleague who did not get what they needed. Alas, they were distracted and couldn’t give 100%. They had to answer work emails and put out some client fires.
My recommendation is that if you do decide to attend a developer training for Sitecore, make sure you are not working on something while you are being trained. This is your one shot to learn as much as you can. Take advantage of it while you have the opportunity.
I came prepared to learn and engage to my training. When I returned and spoke with my boss, I was able to say that the learning experience was invaluable. Proof is in the results: I’ve already completed over a dozen presentation components for our Sitecore site in less than a week. That’s coming from a ASP.NET developer with a VB background guys!
As for better products with better training? I must disagree. The training was excellent and Sitecore is an outstanding solution for our clients.