Shafay Thobani

Another pride of Pakistan, Shafay Thobani the youngest Pakistani boy Microsoft Specialist, claimed as being the World’s Youngest Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist. Following on the footsteps of Arfa Karim Randhawa, who became Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) at the age of nine, the eight-year-old Shafay Thobani became world’s youngest Microsoft Certified.

On April 9, 2012, Shafay Thobani appeared in the Prometric test and secured 91 per cent marks, thus making him the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Training Specialist (MCTS) at the age of eight years and 24 days. He is certified professional in Microsoft Windows 7 Configuration and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2.

Before appearing in the exam, he remained under training of Microsoft certified trainers for 13 months. His claim of being youngest certified professional in the world could not be verified for the fact that Microsoft doesn’t count age of its professionals.

Shafay Thobani’s father hired a PR agency, organized a press conference in a five star hotel in Karachi to announce his heroism in front of media. So instead of pulling the media, they rather contented with pushing their son to media to get him the coverage.

According to Shafay’s trainer Faisal Durrani, it was a challenge for him to teach complicated concepts such as Domain Name System (DNS) and Internet Protocol (IP) address to a child as young as Shafay. So we split the 40-hour course designed for grown-up IT specialists into 13 months for the child. We taught him by giving him easy examples in order to grasp the concepts.

Shafay’s father Dr Shah Thobani said, Shafay liked network and communication programming and has already completed 65 per cent of Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization. Shafay was born the same year Arfa was declared the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional at the age of nine. Arfa was an inspiration for us and I hope that Shafay, too, would be a role model for more children to show their tremendous achievements, Dr Thobani said.

Shafay, who was born on March 13, 2004, grew interest in computers ever since he was a baby. Shafay says, I am proud of myself and I will work for Pakistan in any way possible.