Today, around 200,000 companies are using Microsoft SharePoint to create, manage, save, and collaborate on content. It is a tool that manages content among an enterprise and let everyone collaborate. As the number of businesses using SharePoint is increasing, this is simultaneously increasing the need for IT experts who knows how to manage it.
With enterprise SharePoint environments becoming complex and huge, new job vacancies and roles are becoming prominent to administrate this incredible tool. Today, there are around 30,000 or more job openings for roles related to SharePoint on only LinkedIn. This shows how fast this tool has become a part of the enterprise culture and how quickly more and more companies are adhering to it.
So, if you’re one of those candidates who is looking to start his career with SharePoint, you’re not too late. You can get your first job or further enhance your career with this guide. In this article, we have discussed all the possible SharePoint career tips you can use this year.
5 Tips to Build Your Career Around Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint has become a vast field today. You could be a SharePoint architect, developer, administrator, analyst, or consultant. All these positions are valid job roles and require certain skillset and training. In the same way, one can find a number of job openings available for each of these career type.
Regardless of your career choice, there are certain tips to get a boost to your future career growth and your learning as well. When each job role demands a particular set of skills, aptitudes, expertise, and training, this means there will be no single tip to ace all of these SharePoint job roles. Keeping this in mind, we have laid out five tips to guide your way to career growth around Microsoft SharePoint. Read along!
Be Specific
As discussed before, there are many different job roles you can pursue around Microsoft SharePoint. ow, the question that arises is what exactly are you interested in? What do you want to become? and what skills do you have?
If you answer these questions, you will know what exactly you need to do. You will be specific and more focused. So, when pursuing your career around SharePoint, take a gander at your skills, abilities, interests, knowledge, and aspirations. To help you out, we have also listed a few questions to ask yourself for final evaluation.
- What are you more interested in?
- How experienced you are?
- What can you do perfectly?
- Do you know how to organize things?
- Are you good at management?
- Do you like working with people or technology?
- What skills do you have?
Ask these questions to yourself and you will know what you want and which career choice you should focus on.
Know Your End Goals
Once you know what you want to become, it won’t be hard to know what your end goals are. If you have experience as a consultant and you’re more interested to become an administrator then you should acquire the skills required and follow your heart. This means that after answering all the above-mentioned questions you will have to decide what is more important for you. Do you want to keep doing what you are good at or do you want to take a risk and follow your passion.
Now, once you know what is more important to you then pen down your end goal. This will give you a sense of knowing and you will feel motivated. If you have decided to set yourself on a technical path such as SharePoint administration, SharePoint architect, or SharePoint developer then you will need to learn the technology, get training, and job experience with core technologies needed to run SharePoint. Some of these technologies include Internet Information Services, Windows Server, Microsoft networking services, and SQL Server.
But If you’re less interested in technology and more interested in managing people then you should consider becoming a consultant, user support, business analyst, or user trainer.
Learn Required Skills
The next step is to learn the required skills and polish the already learned aptitudes. For this, you will have to get training for e.g. if you are interested in becoming a SharePoint administrator then you should take SharePoint 2016 Administration training as it is the most used version of SharePoint. However, SharePoint 2019 is already in the market and soon people will shift to that.
Also, you can find many YouTube videos where you can learn more about SharePoint 2016 and differences between SharePoint 2016 and 2019. If you’re fortunate enough to access the current version, then you should learn the fundamentals of Microsoft SharePoint 2019 as well.
However, if you are interested in user training or user support role then you should consider CompTIA A+ certifications. In this way, you will learn some of the important skills.
Since SharePoint is an enterprise collaboration platform, you will also need to learn to manage and implement projects, subsites, and content. For this, you should also consider You may want to consider project management training.
Get Certified
One of the best ways to learn the skills and get growth in your company is by procuring relevant certifications. Just like job roles, you have many different certification choices available as well. Microsoft SharePoint certifications cover the functional areas that you need to learn to become a SharePoint pro.
For example, if you’re seeking a job role as an administration or architect then getting an MCSE: Productivity certification will be an ideal choice. Similarly, if you are interested in becoming a user trainer or consultant then you should consider getting the Microsoft Office Specialist certification.
Acquire Experience
The last and most important tip is to acquire SharePoint working experience. You should have the skills and practical experiences to get better jobs in the future. So, send your resume out to the organizations with the opening for the roles around SharePoint and take the first step towards your boundless career advancements.
You should learn from your manager, contact people on the SharePoint team and take notes from them as well. Keep learning as you work so that you never feel stuck.