Dynamics Profile: Developing a career with Microsoft Dynamics NAV and its community

Natalie Karolak started her Microsoft Dynamics NAV career by chance. As a programmer working on a "totally different proprietary technology," she happened to be looking for a  new job in 2006 at the same time that Tectura Corp.was searching for a NAV developer in Germany.

"[They were] willing to give me some training and I took the chance and stayed," says Karolak, who is now a Dynamics NAV MVP and a product architect in Tectura's solutions group, which manages vertical and horizontal solutions that work with Dynamics.

After about a month of training on Dynamics NAV, Karolak says she got her first assignment - completing a customization for a NAV customer.

"And that's how it started," she says. "I think I did well because I really like to do programming no matter what language."

Of course, the first time she had to write customizations in NAV, Karolak admitted she needed some help from her colleagues. Things worked differently than what she had learned previously, but she found it "very easy to customize," she says.  "And with so many different areas you can focus on, you can't say after a year or so that you've seen everything."

As part of her involvement with the Dynamics NAV community - and the reason she has been named Microsoft Dynamics NAV MVP three times since 2012 - Karolak also moderates the forum on www.msdynamics.de, the German Microsoft Dynamics community.

"I was at Tectura for about three months and I was searching for an answer ...