“Sure, great candidate—so long as you just look at the paper. They don’t have any experience.” I wonder how many times I’ve heard this in my networking career—I wonder how many times this has been said about me, in fact, after I’ve walked out of an interview room. We all know the tale of the…
So you’ve decided, for all the reasons given in my last post on this topic, that you want to learn to code. The next, obvious, question is: what language should you learn? Remember the goal isn’t just to learn to code, but to learn the mindset, tools, and structure of coding; to dog past the…
We’ve all heard it by now: you’d better learn to code, or your network engineering career is going to die a quick (and potentially painful) death. Maybe you could still act as a briefcase carrier, and call yourself a consultant, but without coding skills, you’re open ended job is going to become a dead end,…
Should you stack up certifications, or should you learn something new? To put the question a different way: should Ethan get his CCDE? This week a couple of posts filtered through to my RSS feed that seem worth responding to on the certification front. Let’s begin with the second question first. This week, Ethan posted:…
I guess I’m semi-famous. Or maybe I’m a moderately sized fish in a rather small bowl. Whatever the reason, a lot of people reach out to me for career advice. Which is okay, of course — I make it a personal policy to answer every email that’s addressed to me, individually, that I receive. It…
Tom has an interesting post over at The Networking Nerd on one of my favorite areas of discussion — certifications. To give you a sense — Perhaps raising the cut scores to more than 900 points isn’t the answer. Maybe instead more complex questions or more hands-on simulations are required to better test the knowledge…
While I support certifications, they also make me grouchy. Sometimes they make me really, really, grouchy, in fact — probably more grouchy than I have a right to be. You’ve probably heard the complaints a number of times. For instance, there’s the problem of paper tigers, people who gain the certification but don’t have any…
I’m betting that I could take my certifications off my resume and still have a fair chance at finding a job. It’s a guess, of course, and I’ve never tried any sort of an experiment towards finding out, but the point is this: at some point in your career, certifications should become just one more…
Okay, finally, I’m going to answer the question. For some value of the word “answer,” anyway. I’ve spent three weeks thinking through various question you should be asking, along the way making three specific points: Stop asking “should I get a degree or a certification,” and start asking “what do I want to learn next.”…
One of the things that bothers me the most about the Internet of Things (IOT) is how blithely we slip from talking about objects as things to people as things. Among all the things I do not want to be, a “thing,” attached to the “Internet of Things,” is not one of them. What does…
- « Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
- Next »