You can get a glass plaque on a black base from all kinds of different businesses and organizations. It’s a lot more rare, on the other hand, to get a glass plaque on a black base that comes with a sharp and stylish red fedora. Even Indiana Jones probably doesn’t just have classy red fedora with a black band on a hook in the cloakroom, waiting for his next big adventure.

The best way to get the hat and plaque together is probably to be named Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year by enterprise Linux and open source solution provider Red Hat. That’s what happened today for Neha Sandhu of Auckland, New Zealand at the Red Hat Summit 2018 in San Francisco.

Sandhu, who has worked in IT since 2007, holds both of Red Hat’s core certifications, Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), and has been working with Red Hat technologies for more than a decade. Her current employer, telecom giant Spark New Zealand, is one of the five largest companies in New Zealand.

Originally Telecom New Zealand, formed as an offshoot of the New Zealand Post Office in 1987, Spark has evolved a number of times, including recently. “Over the last few years, Spark New Zealand has undergone a profound transformation journey from a (telecom provider) to a digital services business,” Sandhu said.

As part of the changes, Sandhu ended up working with “Innovation Lab,” a program created to evaluate and deploy open source technologies that could become key elements in Spark’s changing profile. As an Innovation Lab leader, Sandhu played a key role in assessing the potential benefits of adopting Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat OpenStack.

Randy Russell, director of certification at Red Hat, said that Sandhu checks all the boxes the company is looking for in a Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.

“Neha’s curiosity and passion for her work as a technologist have led to her developing skills and knowledge across a number of Red Hat technologies,” Russell said. “Neha provides a model for today’s IT professional. Be curious. Learn more. Apply what you’ve learned. Share what you’ve learned. Repeat. And love what you’re doing while you’re doing it.”

In additional to having her travel and hotel accommodations to attend Red Hat Summit 2018 covered by Red Hat, Sandhu will be featured in various company media, including a special video. And she gets the hat, too. Not even Indiana Jones has one of those.