Dynamics Profile: NAV MVP Finds Balance In Role as a Teacher and an Implementer

For newly-minted Microsoft Dynamics NAV MVP Steven Renders, finding a balance between teaching, contributing to the community, and solving real world challenges has been the key to a fulfilling career. 

A certified Microsoft Dynamics NAV trainer, Renders, who hails from Belgium, has worked with the application for ten years. As a consultant, he also helps companies learn, implement, understand and solve complex business requirements related to Dynamics NAV as well as IT in general.

"I got involved with Dynamics NAV in 2006, when I started to work for Plataan, a training provider in Belgium," Renders says. "They were looking for someone to provide technical training for their Navision consultants and I had a little background and experience and in SQL Server performance tuning. Then I started to learn Navision and I developed some training for those consultants and then moved on to deliver most of their technical training."

As for who taught the teacher, Render says he took some internal training courses on Dynamics NAV and did some project work and consulting to get to know the product.

While at Plataan, Renders was supposed to do a combination of consulting and training, but the company was mainly getting requests from customers who wanted their employees trained on Dynamics NAV. So after nearly five years, Renders decided to leave and become an independent contractor to combine training with real-life, on-the-job work. And in February 2011, he founded his training and consultancy company Think About IT.

"That was a very good decision because I'm still working with Plataan for the training part and I'm also ...