Switchzilla revisits training and cert tools with looming debut of 'Cisco U.' Cisco will shortly open the doors of a new online training service called Cisco U. Announced six months ago with a promise of “AI driven personalized learning paths by learners role, skill set and certification”, plus “modularized and searchable” content, the new service is set to go live in the northern Spring. Cisco …
the best of Cisco’s existing training content
The same Cisco content that:
* Assumes America is the only country
* Is written for software/hardware Cisco shipped years ago
* Practicals that don't work if you follow them to the letter (Or on the current software/hardware)
* The onerous T&Cs that say if the trainer dares to use their own version of the course[1] with all the errors corrected and based on current software/hardware verions they get struck off.
[1] I'm not saying the trainer doesn't pay Cisco its dues for running the course.
Most are gainfully employed, but not practicing law. The ratio here in CA(among people I know) is about 5:1 against, if you include people that WERE practicing lawers and hit the ejector seat along with those that never found work after passing the state bar.
We have more law schools then there is work to go around, partly because most lawyers want $$$ to $$$$ an hour and also love turning down work.
Law schools main product is student loan debt, and their students are the product. The constellation of vendors, service companies, and loan operators are their real customers, that and the Firms that grab the top % of each school and throw any other applications that aren't top tier schools in a skip bin without reading them.
Not many of my friends with law degrees are suited for sysadmin work. One quit a paralegal job and went on to write Ad copy for Sun Micro-systems back in the day. For anyone that could hack together a network config, you could save two years, hundreds of thousands in Law school fees and bar prep, and interest fees, and have been working the whole time. Maybe not as good for top end pay, but it would take years of brown nosing or elbow grease hanging your own shingle to out strip it.
Or you could become a certified welder and after a couple years get certified as a weld inspector and get close to the same money and not ever look at a cisco switch console in your life, which would also have it's merits. And a CCNA isn't worth what it used to be, so you might also waste less of your life and money on ongoing professional development. Now you need a few cloud certs and probably stuff from other vendors.
Long time Cisco guy here - certified for 25 years (WTF), CCIE for 15, CCSI (delivering certification training) for a bit too.
It’s always been a bit of a roller coaster trying to keep up to date/certified. Back in the day it was as simple as “do an associate/professional/expert level exam to keep your certification at that and all lower levels active. Then exams got more and more crap and less coherent, so in comes the CE credit system. The CE system has merit and avoids exams. Costs a bit to achieve though. Now there’s this. Who knows what’s next? I keep myself active for partner certification reasons, but if it weren’t for that I’ll go emeritus and forget about it. You’d think Cisco would encourage people to be certified and find a relevant product stream (instead of ACI, SDA and other stuff which doesn’t really help anyone) instead of making it hard all the time.
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