Training and Certifications

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season. We're looking at the bright side of things. The silver lining and that very big black storm cloud that are all of the things that annoy us on a daily, weekly, regular basis in our job. Those things that make work, work. That they make it not necessarily the funnest thing, even when we love our job. This episode, we're going to look at training and certifications. Now we're sort of in a little bit of a mini series here, a little bit of a riding a wave in the last couple episodes, including this one, where these are things that are not necessarily seen as a negative, I would guess. However, I think more than a few of us have had those moments where we'd just rather skip the training, not worry about the certification. It's just the stress and all the other kind of stuff that can be involved with them that we I think all agree that there's a payoff, there's a return on that investment. However, a lot of us I think would like to skip to the end. But there's some other things besides, again, like performance tuning, another good example, where we had things that were the task itself, the work itself has a very obvious positive outcome. Certifications and training are the same way. Now certifications more so than training. You get done learning something, that's one thing. When you get done learning something and you have a certificate of some sort, a certification test that you have passed, well, that adds a little bit more gravitas to your training to show that you've got some minimum level of understanding that you've achieved. Now that's something we can put aside right now. The whole I learned something new is something that we're going to pass on as far as one of the positives this time around. I want to look at some of the other things. The first one is we're going to hit on one that's becoming rather familiar, and that is expanding our horizons, thinking outside of the box, getting outside of our comfort zone. These are things that are key to becoming a better developer, to advancing your career, to moving from an early on junior, mid-level kind of person to a senior level guru, architect, whatever your title happens to be. One of the things that we need to do is we need to be able to work in new environments. While we want to master the ones that we are in, whether that's a certain framework or a language or operating system or device type, desktop versus mobile or cloud, there's still a bigger world out there. The more that we expand our horizons, that we understand even somewhat the other things that are out there, actually the more likely we are to be better with the things that are in our wheelhouse that are the things that we consider those that we've mastered. For example, let's say you're an accomplished Java developer. If you go out and you learn C Sharp, then there's going to be things that you're exposed to that are C Sharp more or less specific or that are more common in C Sharp that aren't as common in Java. More so if you look at something like a partial language, no offense to those, but something like Auck or even Perl and some of these others or even full-blown languages that are just different in how they approach things, such as maybe like a Python or something like that. When you jump to these other languages and start learning them, there are going to be things that are, one, going to be new potentially to you that you haven't experienced in your current set of languages. Two, it may be a different point of view. It may be a different approach or a different style that's more suitable to this new language, but also could be adopted for the one that you've mastered, your home base language, your comfort zone. When we go out into these other areas, we not only add some arrows to our quiver, we actually will find out that we're, I think in most cases, we're going to get better. It will make us better at the things that we hold near and dear to our heart, the things that we initially mastered, those things that are our core skills. Adding these other, they're not necessarily even ancillary, but these other skills a lot of times will help us work better within our core skill set. This includes going out to other lines of business, probably even more so. If you're a developer and you go out and get some training in marketing or sales or human resources or finance or accounting or you name it, there's going to be information you're going to be able to bring back and utilize moving forward that will make you better as a developer. The first thing is that anytime we are, it goes back to this, I hate to keep hitting this one, but it's very important. Anytime we're challenged, that is an opportunity to grow. That's one of those positives that I know some people look at. I like to take the idea of obstacles and change them to challenges. I'm probably even being more optimistic or glass half full when I look at it and say, This is an opportunity to grow. This is an opportunity to get better. You think about it from professional sports as a simple thing. Every game they play is an opportunity to win another game. Everything that's thrown at you is an opportunity to succeed or master another area or skill or bit of knowledge. This does become a recurring theme, but I think it's something that you can actually as we wrap up talking about this as we get to the end of this season, there's some things you can take away from this and apply to just about every challenging situation. That's one of them. I keep going back to that. That doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. Most things aren't going to kill you. Just the challenges that you've run into, they're going to make you stronger. The next thing that's a positive is one that actually initially I thought was only going to apply to those that are newer to the process, that are earlier in their career, that haven't had to push themselves and learn, train, get multiple certifications. But the more I've thought about it, I think it applies even deeper into your career. That is when you go through training or work on a certification and actually probably a certification when it's self-driven is probably the best example of this, I think you learn how you learn. You will most likely be exposed to or have multiple options for learning, whether it's by doing, whether it's sitting in a class, reading something online, looking at examples, whatever it is. But I think as you go through these, you will find, particularly this goes after not just one or two, but when you've learned multiple things or tried to go through multiple certification types, you'll find out what works for you. You will be much more comfortable with how you learn these kinds of topics. Now, one would think going through college, you get your degree, you've been through high school and all that and all those years of schooling that you would know. You would have a good idea of what works best for you. Maybe at a high level, visual learner versus practical learner versus the different major types, maybe you know what family you fall into. I think the specifics come when you have more, when you've spent more time digging into those specifics. So there, for example, there may be a certain line of training tools or training sites or approaches or trainers that work best for you, that you find that that person or those people or that style is exactly what you need. That's what gets you to the end faster. And so when we learn, whether this is just learning for the learning sake or working towards a certification, this is another one of those things that not only do we get better at doing our main job, we get better at learning. We get better at growing. This is one of those where every time we do this, it's practice essentially. The more you practice it, the more hours you put into it, the closer you get to mastery. Now what mastery is when you consider it, you know, look at it in the world of learning, I don't know. How do you master learning things? I'm not sure what that would look like, but I think it is, you know, it's easy enough to see that you can do things faster, more reliably, and you can estimate. You can gauge what it's going to take as you get further into these things. You can understand that, okay, this is something I don't know, and this is what it looks like. And based on my experience, I know it's going to take me a week, a month, a year, whatever it is to figure that out, to get comfortable with it. And that goes back to things like estimation and even being able to set expectations properly, whether you're an employee or a contractor or consultant, is that you can look at situations that are not ideal, that are research and development types of situations, and you can say, okay, I don't really know what I don't know, but based on past experience, I can give you a ballpark that it's going to take X amount of time for me to figure this out. And you may think that seems rare, but honestly, it's not. There's a lot of cases where, at least in my experience, and probably, I would think, argue in most people, where you've got something that's new. It may be learning a new API, it may be understanding a new framework, it may be assessing a new development tool, it may be working, figuring out a new version of a development tool, development language, all the other things. It's just in this fast moving environment that we have, it just makes sense that we should know, have a ballpark idea of what it's going to take us to learn that new thing. Maybe even to master that new thing. Maybe we get far enough along in our career that we understand it's going to take us X amount of time to master this new version, this new language, this new platform. That's very valuable. When you can do that, you can set expectations and meet or exceed them. That's good. I don't care what your job is or your focus or your role. That's always key. Meet and or exceed expectations. If you could just walk into any interview and guarantee that, I'm pretty sure that you would be at the top of the list right away to be hired. We've got the ever present, every challenge we face makes us stronger, is an opportunity to become better. Then we've also got in the same vein, when we do things, we get better at them, even learning. Another thing that I think didn't really become apparent to me until I went through, we'll call them families of learning and certifications. For example, if you were to do a bunch of Oracle training, their official training or certifications or Microsoft's official training or certification, or you pick the platform or the vendor, IBM or anybody else that's out there, there is a mindset that's not, this isn't really the vision or the mission necessarily of those companies. This is the actual technical, I almost want to say heartbeat. This is what they live to do, what they see themselves as, what they see their products doing. You will get a sense of that when you go through a series of trainings or certifications. You'll see there will be common themes, even across very different technologies. For example, Microsoft or Amazon or Oracle, most of them, IBM, they've got certifications that are in specific languages. They've got them in infrastructure, they've got them in networking, they've got them in databases. They have them in security. There's all these areas of lines of business even that you can get certifications in. But if you look at those, if you look at the training or the certifications across those lines of businesses, across those roles or goals, you'll see how they view the world, how they approach most problems. It's not quite a group thing, but I think it's along that line that you get a bunch of people that have worked with more or less the same kinds of products and are working on similar enough projects. Also with all the meetings and all the kinds of stuff, they start to just, they have a common language. They have a common set of goals and they start really, I think, influencing each other enough that they have a common approach. When you spend some time learning or working on certifications, you will be able to see how these industry giants see the world and see how they approach things, which is in itself an incredible help. It goes back to really the earlier one of when you learn, you learn that you can learn how you learn. You get better at learning. Even more so when you learn how certain groups, companies, organizations, industries, even how they think, how they approach things, how they approach problems. When they have something new, you're going to have an idea of what that's going to look like before you even sit down with it. If you know, and this is a good example, if you wanted to go back historically, if you looked at Microsoft back many, many, many years ago when they had Visual Basic and then they did .NET and they had ASP.NET and then they moved into the more true modern, I guess, .NET platform. We had VSP.NET or Visual Basic .NET, I apologize, and C sharp .NET and they had F sharp and things like that. You sort of saw that coming. I think when you saw ASP.NET, you saw, and again, part of it's because we borrow from what we know, but that also means that just like in the real world, if you see a family, a literal family, then there's going to be traits that will, maybe you'll see a relative of theirs that you don't know as a relative and you'll be like, wow, you sort of look like that Jones family and find out that it is. Well, you get the same thing when you start, when you work towards learning and certification and this is, you're going into a deeper form of learning, a deeper form of knowledge. And I think because of that, it's where you start sort of getting into the, not to get but like the DNA of how they solve problems, how they create and craft solutions. And knowing that can be pretty useful in itself, especially as you get further in your career and you want to apply the best tool to the best, for the problem you're solving. When you're looking at vendors, not only do tools have strengths and weaknesses, you'll find that vendors a lot of times have strengths and weaknesses. There's certain problems they solve better than others. And so that alone will help you narrow the field rather quickly when you're trying to assess a good possible platform or solution for whatever problem you're solving. Now that's just a few, there's actually a lot of other positives that come out of the process of just learning something new, of sitting for a certification, of pushing yourself. But alas, I don't want to go too long on this one. So we'll just skip out to the, we'll jump out to that challenge. Challenge of the week, what's the last thing that you put on your roadmap, your career roadmap that you've worked on as a certification or something new to learn? How you doing on that? Has that stalled out? Are you moving pretty steadily along? And if you're not moving steadily along, maybe you do something, change your schedule around, spend 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day, put that into your schedule, start your day with it, end your day with it, do a little lunch break review of it, however you can, stay a little time and make sure that you're still pushing yourself forward, that you are continuing to advance your skills and you're not just getting swallowed up in your, the monotony and maybe sometimes just the overwhelm of your daily work. And that being said, I'll try not to steal any more of your time and let you get back to that work, whether it's overwhelming or not. But as always, have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress, so let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developer Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernoor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.