September Poll Results: What Courses/Certifications Do You Plan on Obtaining in the Next Year?

Albert Einstein said that “wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” And on a somewhat different — but no less astute — note, Mark Twain reflected that “training is everything; the peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”

Well, we know that there are a lot of extremely smart peaches and cauliflowers here in the Devolutions community. And to get a sense of just how wise the garden is, last month we asked you: What courses/certifications do you plan on obtaining in the next year?

Or, for those of you who don’t have a plan in place, we asked you to tell us the courses/certifications that you would like to achieve in the next year.

The Results

We received many responses, which was not surprising given how essential continuous learning is in the IT field. It’s like a marathon without a finish line (but on the bright side, instead of only drinking water and eating bananas along the route, you can have beer and pizza).

Below is a snapshot of the overall learning plan in alphabetical order (click to learn more). Entries with a * were mentioned multiple times.

• Ansible
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect*
• Azure*
• Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)*
• Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)*
• Cisco certifications*
• Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV 2022)*
• Data Center Virtualization Deploy (VCAP-DCV Deploy 2022)
• ITIL 4 Foundation
• Microsoft 365
• MikroTik
• Network+
• Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Engineer
• Packer
• Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Engineer (PCNSE)
• Project Management Professional (PMP)*
• Server+
• Terraform
• Zabbix

Certifications Are Important — but not Everything

A few community members shared a valid point: while certifications can be valuable for a variety of reasons, they are not automatic gateways to mastery. Ron articulated this nicely:

I've been working in IT for over 20 years now and only have a few certifications, none of them for the job I am currently doing. Everything I know, I learned "on the job." So diplomas or certifications are not at all mandatory to fulfill a job well, a good mind and eagerness to learn things are. Indeed, one is never too old to learn and because in IT things are changing quite rapidly, one is constantly learning.

We completely agree with this! What matters most is continuous learning, which can be obtained in many ways, including — but certainly not exclusively — through formal certifications and courses. Indeed, we’ve all known someone in our lives (maybe that annoying relative whom you bump into at weddings) who has all kinds of acronyms after their name, but doesn’t really know much at all. But what can you do? Alas, as comedic genius George Carlin advised: “never argue with an idiot; they will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

The Winners Are…

To start with, you’re ALL winners because you value applicable, verifiable, and legitimate competence. In other words, you know — and can detect in an INSTANT — the difference between actual intelligence and superficial pretense (Boss from Sysadminotaur, we’re looking at you!).

Now, let’s announce the two randomly selected participants who will each receive a $25 Amazon gift card. Congratulations to Adrian Ayran and Cary Wagner! Please email me at lcadieux@devolutions.net to claim your prize.

Thank you again to everyone who participated. And get ready: the October poll will be here very soon!