I was cleaning out my desk over the weekend and found some old relics of my professional past. I found a mix of trinkets, awards, business cards, certifications, and some old floppy disks. I flipped through the disks and found this exam preparation software for the Networking Essentials exam, which was part of the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer NT 4.0 certification.

I passed this exam back in 1998 and completed the entire certification for MCSE in 1999. That was 25 years ago. Wow, time flies.

Memories don’t always serve me right. I often think about floppy disks as an artifact from my childhood, not my early professional career. The fact that I bought a certification preparation course that was installed via floppy disks really speaks to how ancient this is.

I do remember studying the subject matter. I remember learning the differences been ethernet and token ring, the differences between IPX/SPX and TCP/IP, and the OSI model. Most notably, I remember custom subnetting. That was the bugger of it all.

What’s it for?

I had a strong motivation for pursuing this certification. I had very little education and professional experience under my belt. I wanted to prove to myself and prove to the world that I knew what I was doing.

The education in the certification course matched up to the real world, sort of. Reality is always a little messier and more complicated than the pristine world of certification test scenarios, but that’s okay. I was grateful for the foundational knowledge. It gave me a framework on which to build my real-world knowledge and experiences.

5 years

I often tell college students that the technologies they learn in school will be obsolete in 5 years. That’s a sobering thought, especially considering how much time and money they spent learning it in the first place. By choosing to go into the technology profession, they are signing up to be a lifelong learner. That’s the deal.

I experienced an even tighter cycle. I went to school from 1997-1999 and learned the NT 4.0 network operating system. I finally got certified on it in late 1999. A few months later, Windows 2000 came out, with a completely new directory service, called Active Directory, which every company on the planet still runs to this day.

This didn’t bug me for a moment. I learned Windows 2000 and got certified in that a year later. I remember that day well. It was September 10, 2001, the day before the world changed.

Floppy disks

Nothing quite makes the point about obsolesce like a training course on a floppy disk, so that’s why I made it the feature of this article. While each certification is important, the real value comes from the repetition of the cycle.

Lots of people can master a technology. What impresses me are the ones who are always willing to become dumb again and learn the next new thing, time and time again. That’s impressive.

Recognition

At CHS, we’ve decided to recognize employees who earn certifications. They get an applause at a town hall, and a custom sticker to put on their laptop. We need our workforce to be equipped with the latest and greatest skills, so we put a spotlight on those who are doing it the best.

Action step:

I passed my first certification exam 25 years ago. So what? All that means is that I’m old. It doesn’t matter at all. Here’s a different question: How old is your most recent certification? I’ll go first. My most recent certification was AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, back in 2020. While that may seem recent, that was already 4 years ago. Shoot. By my own standard, I better get busy and learn something new. Fast.

Your turn: What/when was your last certification? What’s your next one? Mine will probably be something related to AI. Any recommendations for me? Let me know in the comments.

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