What Microsoft has ever said and required from a nominated professional is that they must be 18 years of age or older. That is the requirement that I know of. The rest of the stuff, I don't have any experience with. Now, breaking the myth part,
For those, who are Students, I can guarantee there are many rewards for being an MSP too. One of which, being offered free trials for being Microsoft Certified!
3. Content requirement
Microsoft selects around 4000 professionals as their MVP each year, in their 4 rings (January, April, July and finally, in October). Nominations are made throughout the year for the next ring and they go through the nominations as well as their previous MVPs to select the MVPs for next 365 days. Since the list is a tight list and they have to select experts from around their 90 fields, the content must be very qualitative.
I have been asked, what to write. My simple answer is, what you do... Just write it. Most of the time, programmers solve technical problems in their fields, such as finding a way to solve a problem, a logical issue, building a framework that most people require and so on. Most of these items are a good candidate to be written for your profile. I mostly write what I did previously in the past week, which most of the time covers a new tip for programmers, and advice for programmers to use in their own projects. Most of the time, when I build stuff I share that online as a code. If you want to increase your chances, upload and publish it at
MSDN Galleries. I would also recommend using and joining a good community to start participating in. Microsoft looks for individuals who are active in communities, and not just individually.
Post materials
In case you like to share written content, articles, blogs, and tips are the best way to share them. You can share the material in any language, English is recommended -- not required. Here are my tips for such content:
- Must be catchy! The title and the content must be friendly. MSDN has everything written up already, but why would your blog post stand out?
- Grammatical issues and sentence structure does matter. But since English is not the primary language for most of us, that won't be an issue.
- Try ignoring a duplicate post. Write something that you believe hasn't been covered yet.
You can write your content on your own personal website or blog, but to get more views and a good audience I recommend joining a good community. C# Corner is best -- yes,
C# Corner hasn't paid me a penny for saying this! I joined C# Corner a year ago and I received a lot of love from here and the bad sides (every community has them, right?) are not heavier than the love that I had received. Plus, did I mention, having Dinesh Beniwal in your contact list will definitely increase your audience. He is a great guy, do follow him
@dbeniwal21.
You can post your heavier articles as ebooks on the community too. Books are a great addition to your online profile, and they will definitely help you out in standing out in the crowd. There have been discussions, as to why post the books for free. Well, when money comes in, ethics go out of the window. Period.
Videos
Videos do play a vital role because most of the audience and users don't like to read a long book, or guide. They need to learn and fix their problems in under five minutes. Videos are great in such conditions and, a good speech won't let them down either.
Open source contributions
Microsoft has now started supporting your open source contributions too. You can publish your projects on GitHub, add them as a profile achievement and it can surely count as a contribution to the community. This will help you out in many ways, even if you simply just added a contribution to existing project -- Microsoft has many projects, in fact, Microsoft is the top contributor to open source projects as of now.
So, of course if you are an open source contributor then don't give up hope, your chances are still very fresh and ripe.
Meetings and local events
This is the most important part and contribution to the community. Most of the time, the local events count as the heaviest contribution because at the same time many people come and interact with you on the topic that interests them most. Microsoft itself provides many local events and gatherings and also supports many MVP-lead gatherings, which means Microsoft has a keen interest in finding the individuals who try to participate locally, with customers and students in training them, helping them learn new standards of technology.
So my own personal opinion is to move onward and try in this one. Now, before I move onwards, before I became an MVP, Vincent and I had a talk and just like any non-MVP programmer, I asked him and just like any MVP, he answered my questions in the following theme:
I believe this would clarify most of the things and confusions in the mind of beginners.
Final words
Just like Vincent has said, if you are working hard just to get the award, you are never going to get it. I can confirm this, because back in 2013 when I wanted to be awarded an MVP award, I didn't get it. Yes, I was annoyed. But now, I had been sharing my knowledge, just because I loved to and one day I got message from Dinesh, telling me that I should nominate myself (Vincent said the same)... I was unsure whether I would qualify as one or not, but something told me to go and do it. A few weeks later, I received an email from Microsoft, telling me that I need to share some information to complete the nomination form, and on the 1st of July I was awarded as Microsoft MVP.
So, the rule of thumb is: Just share your knowledge. There are many experts out there too. If you don't get an award, don't give up. Keep sharing, keep learning and keep teaching. Microsoft will keep track of you and in any case, Microsoft employees, previous MVPs, and the person himself can nominate himself. Microsoft will look into the application again, and if you qualify, welcome to the crew. :-)