A Plug for the USPJ Academy

Rarely in my career have I been as jazzed about something which I have been involved with as I am about the USPJ Academy.  We held our inauguration event on 31 May, and now we’ve got classes up and running and students walking the virtual halls.

Founded by my friends Bjørn Furuknap and Anil Sharma, the USPJA aims to be the best SharePoint-focused training option on the planet. Period.

I became associated with things after talking to Bjørn at the excellent San Francisco SPTechCon event back in February when he asked me to create some content for courses about the Data View Web Part (DVWP) and jQuery. The more I talked to Bjørn and Anil, the more time I found myself spending on the Academy, taking on larger and larger roles.  Now I’m facilitating my courses, playing the role of librarian for our rapidly burgeoning online content library, doing QA for the platform, washing the dishes, and walking the dog.  And I’m having a ball.

If I could do the USPJA full-time, I might consider it, but the client work pays the bills (at least for now) and I don’t think it would ever make sense to stop doing it because it’s where the rubber meets the road and all of my good ideas come from.  It’s also a part of what I think makes the USPJA special (and I love client work, too!).  All of us on the faculty are out there doing SharePoint all the time for real.  We’re not necessarily trainers by trade, but doers who like to train.  All of our course material is based on what *works*, not what it says in some SDK.

If you feel like you’d like to learn more about SharePoint in a virtual, genuine community setting, with people from all over the world, and with top notch faculty (no, I’m not blowing my own horn: I’m blowing the others’ horns), then you owe it to yourself to check the USPJA out.

We’re in what we are calling the Early Access Program right now, and I’ve got to tell you, at $197 per month, it’s a steal. For that low price, you get access to:

• Our full library of content so that you can use it at your own pace
• The running courses, which you can take two of at any given time
• A full array of on-demand lab machines in the cloud
• Free access to Open Lectures from some of the brightest bulbs in the SharePoint world, exclusive to the USPJA. (Outsiders will have to pay for access to these live events.)
• Focused access to a community of people who are passionate about the art of SharePoint and learning
• and more…

To me, any one of these things might be worth the $197/month. Take them all together and we must be idiots to charge so little.  And we’re planning more and more capabilities over the next few months as the Early Access Program continues. The great ideas just keep on coming.  If you join us now, you’ll be able to come along for the ride as well as help to influence which routes we take.

C’mon over and visit us now, ya hear?