I’m sure we all have our own stories about how we “fell” into the SharePoint-verse. Perhaps your employer decided to make the switch and your job title suddenly expanded to include “SharePoint Administrator/Architect/Developer”; you were considered “computer savvy” and you were recruited by your company to help with the SharePoint transition; or your role was more peripheral to the technology and you came to it by way of business intelligence, web design, community manager, search, etc., etc.
Me? I came to SharePoint in a totally different way: I chose it.
Pull up a chair, my friend, and let me tell you my story.
Armed with HTML for Dummies, I built my first website in 1993. Ever since, I’ve been involved with the Internet and websites in one form or another for the past 20 years. At times as my main employment, and others on a more peripheral level.
I’d been self-employed for 12 years, with the last five heavily involved in social media marketing. When I decided to go back into the corporate world, I decided to market myself as an online marketer. For a full year, I applied for every job opening that had to do with social media/digital/online marketing. Out of those 98 job applications (I kept a log), I had four interviews. No offers.
I remember waiting to hear back from the fourth interview and telling my friend, Greg, about being a bit nervous. He replied:
“I was supposed to have a job interview tomorrow but one of my clients had an emergency so I’m going to have to try to reschedule. And this is the second time I’ve had to reschedule so I can probably kiss that job goodbye.”
Two weeks later I saw Greg again and asked about the interview. He said nonchalantly: “Oh, they offered me a job… as a matter of fact, I have three job offers.”
What the….?!!!
That’s right, three offers within a two-week span, and I can’t even get one after 12 months of trying. What does Greg do? He’s a SharePoint consultant. He had talked about SharePoint before, but all I could remember was that it could make websites. Over the following weekend I did some research, emailed questions back and forth with Greg, talked to him on the phone, and by Sunday night decided to hitch my wagon (and my future) to SharePoint. Because this was what I found:
- There is a high demand for people with SharePoint skills (see Greg, above)
- The salaries are higher than average
- There are 20,000 new SharePoint users a day (7.3 million new SharePoint users every year)
- In 2009, SharePoint was a $1.3 billion business with more than 100 million users
- The product is backed by a company with a net worth of $230 billion
- 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint
- 100% of the US Federal government has SharePoint licenses, but they can’t find enough developers
Now my Momma didn’t raise no fool, but it doesn’t take a degree in economics to understand the advantages of going into a field that is in high demand. Can we all say job security?
So with my decision to work with this SharePoint thing, I figured it would be a good idea to learn more about it and how to use it. Greg helped me pick a dev box, and by the following weekend I had installed my very own SharePoint 2010 environment. I got some books from the library and started figuring out how this worked. But I knew that no one was going to hire me if I didn’t have any job experience. So I set my sights on finding either an internship or volunteer opportunity. The first person I approached via LinkedIn didn’t bother to respond. The second person I approached responded with interest, which led to a meeting, which led to a job offer. All within three weeks of making my decision to jump into SharePoint with both feet. And they were even going to PAY ME!
I have to chuckle at all the disparaging remarks that I have read about SharePoint and Microsoft. I see SharePoint’s complexity and steep learning curve as positives. When I was a webmaster in the early 2000’s, I recognized that it was very easy to learn HTML and call yourself a webmaster. Consequently there were a lot of out of work webmasters. SharePoint isn’t something you learn in a weekend, which is good, because complexity culls out the amateurs, increases the value of your skill set, and raises the level of professionalism in the industry.
My new position is with a major university helping them to prepare to roll out a system-wide SharePoint 2013 Intranet. The people I work with have extensive experience with SharePoint, having launched their public-facing website on the SharePoint 2010 platform, so I count myself as very lucky to have landed in an environment with such knowledgeable co-workers.
My job is to research different proofs of concept, become knowledgeable in these areas, and become a resource. So I am basically being paid to learn. How awesome is that!
Although still a novice at SharePoint, I am excited to go to work every day because I know I’ll learn something new.
How did you “fall” into SharePoint? Use the comments section below to share your story.