For Apple IT admins, the new year means it’s a good time to upskill

Continuing education has always been important for IT professionals, but the need to keep your skill set up to date is now more important than ever. 

While it’s easy to look to enterprise vendors — or independent operations such  CompTIA — as sources for training and certification, the options for IT pros tasked with managing Macs, iPhones, and other Apple devices aren’t as well-known. But there are plethora of resources out there, if you know where to look.

Apple’s own resources

Obviously, the first place to look for training is directly from Apple, which maintains multiple resources for IT professionals — including a couple of certifications. Here’s a rundown of those you should know about.

WWDC

Let’s start with the one everyone knows about, which is Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) held every June. The event has become an Apple keynote event in its own right, and while most of the content is intended for Apple developers, it always includes at least a few sessions for IT pros; the exact number  varies each year, but the “What’s New in Managing Apple Devices” is a perennial option. Some years there are several others, such as when Apple unveiled declarative device management or sign in with Apple at work, or when the company opened up about how to use Managed Apple accounts in your organization. 

The topics vary, but they’re almost always a must-have option to explore every year. 

Apple Developer Resources. Apple makes loads of additional information available to its developer community. Again, much of it isn’t strictly IT-focused, but there are a surprising number of useful references — if you’re willing to do some digging. These include:

Device Management — This is the resource on how to manage Apple devices. There are overviews and detailed descriptions of mobile device management (MDM) payloads and everything in between.

What’s new in Apple platform deployment — As the name suggests, this is also a must-know resource, because it covers the basic information about how to deploy Apple devices at scale across all of the company’s device lineup.

ManagedAppDistribution — This is used for managing apps once you’ve enrolled and begun to deploy apps across your fleet.

AppleSeed for IT — This is where you set up and manage the testing of Apple’s beta programs within your organization. I’ve more than once noted how partnering with adventurous employees can help you more effectively test and plan for upcoming releases; this is the place to get started.

Apple Business Essential user guide — For small or medium-size businesses (SMBs), Apple offers an in-house device management solution called Apple Business Essentials. For IT pros new to Apple devices, this is a great starting place, regardless of the size of your organization and it serves as a stepping stone to Apple Business Manager, which all larger organizations and MDM solutions will require. 

Apple Training — Apple doesn’t offer the breadth of IT training and certification it once did (and that other enterprise players continue to offer). Regardless, the company does offer significant training resources. These break down into developer training (as a class with no certification and intended for budding developers, enterprise or not) and IT training.  For IT training there are four categories, only two of which offer certifications. The first two — device support and deployment training — are the ones for which Apple provides study materials and related exercises as well as a certification exam that can be proctored online. The other two — Mac Security Compliance and Apple Business Essentials — are incredibly useful courses (the latter is especially important for SMBs) but don’t come with a certification exam or credential attached. 

Apple developer documentation and support — Again, Apple’s developer documentation is well worth studying, but its developer support forums (and support forums) focused on the enterprise community are also important resources.

MDM and cloud vendor resources

Although Apple provides incredible device and user management capabilities across its platforms, implementing them largely requires working with one or more MDM vendors — including JAMF, Kandji, Microsoft, VMWare, Fleet, JumpCloud and SimpleMDM, to name a few. 

There are two aspects to consider: the vendor that will actually be providing the management tools and the cloud-based identity management with which they’ll need to federate (generally from Microsoft or Google, but potentially also from companies like PingIdentity and OAuth). 

Into this mix, add the range of managed service providers, consultants, and trainers that are often part of the selection, deployment and management of enterprise systems — including those focused on Apple IT. 

Although the exact resources and guidance will often be dictated but your vendor relationships and infrastructure, many websites – vendors, MSPs, and others – offer an amazing wealth of information that is freely available. 

Vendor certifications

Just as Apple offers its own certifications, so do most MDM vendors that work with the company. Some of these are very in-depth and product-specific; others are broader and focused on integrating various enterprise and cloud solutions to achieve a secure, managed environment. 

CompTIA – CompTIA is an industry trade group that offers many vendor-agnostic enterprise certifications. That list doesn’t include a certification specific to Apple, but it does include several that any Apple IT pro should consider – Mobility+ being the most Apple/MDM-focused. 

The Mac Admins Foundation — One of the most wide-ranging resources for Apple IT pros is the Mac Admins Foundatation, a nonprofit focused on providing resources to the Apple IT community. Its offerings break down largely into a handful of key resources. The first is the MacAdmins slack channel which is probably the biggest community for learning and sharing Apple IT knowledge on the planet. Alongside this is the Mac Admins Open Source Project on GitHub and the Mac Admins Podcast. 

The Mac Admins and Mac SysAdmin conferences — There are two major annual conferences that combined provide the biggest resource available to Apple IT pros whether they can attend or not. These are the Mac Admins Conference, held every summer in Pennsylvania, and the Mac SysAdmin conference, which takes place each fall in Sweden. Both conferences (and the vendors and presenters involved with them) put virtually all of the content online for free access, either as videos or slide decks or additional documentation from specific sessions. Don’t underestimate how useful these events and their content are as resources. 

Vendor user conferences 

I’ve already highlighted the resources vendors can offer in terms of documentation and certification, but many also have their own user and/or developer conferences. The best-known is probably JAMF’s annual JNUC conference (typically in mid-to-late fall), but Microsoft and VMWare events (those focused on mobile and others) are also worth researching.

In general, vendors make conference content freely available and there’s value exploring it, even if it comes from a company whose products you’re not planning to use. 

Online blogs, newsletters and podcasts

It often seems like many IT pros charged with managing Apple hardware sort of stumble onto the extensive range of online blogs, columns, newsletters, and podcasts that are out there; some come from vendors, but many admins and authors provide great insights into how best to use all of these technologies on a daily basis.  It’s impossible for me to cover all of these additional sources, but the following is a list of those I subscribe to and find the most useful. 

9 to 5 Mac’s Apple @ Work column and podcasts

Alan Siu’s Blog

Dan K. Nelson’s Blog

Der Flounder

HCS Technology Group – Technical Articles

Kandji Blog

macadmin.fraserhess.com

MacAdmins.news

Michael Tsai’s Blog

motionbug

Radical Admin Blog

Scripting OS X

Secret Chest

Systems Management Squad

The Big MacAdmin Blog

The Eclectic Light Company

The Mac Security Blog

TidBITS