Obsolete knowledge, is obsolete
Our industries, no matter what industry it may be, continues to change, be it retail sales specialist, or CEO of a small managed service provider. Computers, shoes, pants, or whatever it may be from fifteen years ago has changed in favor of increased productivity, decreased overhead, and at the end the goal of any capitalistic companies goal, profit. Having an intricate knowledge of a Kalpana switch from 1993 sounds like a great conversational piece, but in a world of fiber optic cables and better management protocol, its a useless piece of information. Coasting along on this sort of knowledge is not going to help in an ever changing world.Outdated certifications
Another fun bit about older certifications, is that many of them were designed in a very short sighted manner. If a professional were to obtain a certification from any major vendor such as Cisco, Microsoft, or CompTIA, the certification expiration dates were set as indefinite. Meaning a lot of individuals who obtained these certifications have nice resume attention grabbers, but what does it say about their knowledge when the issuance date is ten years old. It may not pertain to everyone who has these certifications, there are those splinter cells that call that their stopping date for learning new material. The day they earned their certification meant they learned everything they needed to know, and wont' spend anymore time learning new things.
Day of issuance is not the end
The problem with older certifications, applies to college degree's as well. The day you earn that degree does not signify a date to stop learning. The coding structures you were taught in introductions to C++ or the balancing calculator for advanced accounting, changes year by year. Even though the paper looks good on a resume, it should never act as a date to cease education.
Continued Education
Even though not everyone is required to keep their nose to the grind stone to keep up on the newest trends and newest tools of the trade to maintain our fancy doctorate, or Cisco certification, continuing our education only improves both our knowledge, and employ ability. Keeping ourselves ahead of the bell curve is hands down one of the most important things we can do, in any industry, to make ourselves not just better employee's, but also make us intelligible in the discussions we have regarding our career, our hobby, or whatever it is that we are looking to do.Being so far out of touch with the present state of the industry, makes it hard to talk to certain people, and when you are with a group of your peers, makes that individual look worse and worse. Sometimes when they are with a less articulate group of people, they can pull off complete nonsense and still look fine (baffle with bull****). Here is an example of such a situation.
Outside the bell curve
When upgrading the network in this office I made it a point to have multiple vendors competing to seal the bid and provide top notch service and hardware and make this network more stable. Of the four vendors bidding, one of the vendors came out looking all around foolish, sending their highest qualified employee out to talk with us and find out the best solution for us. At some point the topic of spanning tree protocol came up by myself, looking to decrease time to access network resources, increase productivity, and start to implement a closer knit mesh within the environment. Suddenly the highest qualified employee began to yell, in a professional meeting, with myself, and ownership of the company, started spouting off how networking storms would occur if I even attempted it, and proclaiming spanning tree protocol did not exist.
If this conversation was held with a full IT staff, the man would have been laughed out of the office, by stating a protocol that has existed since 1985 was never a thing was baffling. Although his years of experience, knowledge, and pertinence made him look like a god among men when I spoke to the ownership of the company. Where I defended my words, and those who don't to IT discounted me as a two year IT guy vs a thirty year IT guy, who has the experience and who is a whipper snapper?
At the end of the day, I called a second meeting to defend my case with the owners and owners only, to account for my words, actions, and claims. But the problem here was he was so stuck in his old ways that he didn't believe in the existence of modern technology
Negative recourse's
What would have happened if I was not in place to deflect this guy? An outcome that happens far too often in way too many companies, an out dated set of knowledge gets used to deploy an updated piece of hardware, leaving countless vulnerabilities in place, as well as misconfigured applications all over the place. Out dated knowledge is detrimental and should be discouraged, hiding behind a piece of paper can only help for so long before the weight of the rock crushes the person hiding under it. Please make that effort to keep learning not jut for yourself and your own wellbeing, but for whoever you're looking to be a potential prospect for.
If you have any comments questions or concerns, let us know in the comment section below. And as always, be safe my fellow goblins.
0 comments:
Post a Comment