Microsoft certification ?
About a year ago, I gave up my IT job to set up an ecommerce site / business.
Now that my site is up and running I'm thinking about returning to full-time employment and continuing with my e-commerce site evenings and weekends.
I'm looking to do some Microsoft certification training to "confirm" the IT/web skills I've already got and also to fine tune a little bit.
My main skills are the following:
ASP -good level, (shopping cart system, interface with back-end database with view, edit and add functions etc)
HTML - Good level
Relational databases - Good level (Designed and developed 10-table access database with forms, queries etc. Good knowledge of SQL)
Javascript - Basic level.
What I'm interested in doing is getting some training which would help me to hit the ground running in a web development job using these sort of skills in a team environment. In other words, so far I have been developing in single-user mode using a text editor, MS personal web server (for local testing), cuteftp (for uploading to web host), and a locally installed version of MS Access.
I imagine that in a company environment, some kind of development software suite is used. I've heard of Visual Interdev and Visual Studio. Is it worth me getting some training in these 2 ?
I'm also thinking of getting some training in Visual Basic as I seem to see this a lot in the job ads for ASP jobs. Also perhaps some training in SQL Server as I have only really developed in MS Access...
Does anyone have any experience with these MS certification programmes ? Are they hard ? Worth it ? Well valued by employers ?
Any advice ?
Cheers