We have all gone through training in our personal and professional lives, whether it be corporate mandated safety training to help with their CYA initiative, Lamaze classes for the new parents-to-be, or specific training that is tailored to help you hone your required skills for you career. The days of college degrees being enough to get you a high paying job, and a high school diploma being enough to get you an entry level job are over. With the growing rate of people earning associates degrees or higher, the job industry has decided to rely on another institute of knowledge to help them evaluate a potential employees worth.... certifications. Coming from the technical filed, I can tell you that the jobs I have obtained relied more heavily on my certifications, rather than my education. I am of course excluding experience, since it is a catch 22 situation where people want you to have it, but you can not achieve it without a job to get the experience. I will touch on that sensitive topic in another post, since it requires a lot of explanation on how to obtain it.
Since I have started building my path to my career over 15 years ago, I can tell you that training has become a pivotal point that has had a dramatic influence on my decisions to help get me where I am today. I have gone to dozens of training classes, covering a wide variety of skills and knowledge. From doing so, I can tell you that there is such a thing as wasting time on training. With the advent of putting emphasis on training over education, it can be quite easy to believe that all training is good, but I am here to tell you that it is not the case. While most training offered to you can be beneficial, whether it be in the short-term or long-term goals of your career, what I am saying is that you need to prioritize your training, in order to streamline your educational and career path.
I will give you an example. When I was a LMW (last mile wireless) technician, I volunteered a lot of my time to Cisco network training. I was thoroughly interested in networking and wanted to learn more about it. The training helped me understand more about what was affected by my job, but it did not necessarily help me do my job. I knew, though, that they were closely related. When the LMW team was defunct, the organization I was working for decided to put me into the networking team, since I had so much training in Cisco networking. This ended up being a huge advantage for me. It allowed someone who, at the time only had an associates degree, to be involved with a team that would have asked for more education in order to work with. My training is what saved me from a possible life of monotony, dealing with a job that consisted of far more basic and non-intelligent tasks.
To play the Devil's advocate, I must also say that there has been plenty of training opportunities that I have agreed to, that ended up being a waste of time. While I was in the middle of my "fire sale" of training opportunities, I participated in a lot of training classes that ended up not helping my career, nor did it help me in any other beneficial way. For example, I once participated in Cisco MARS training. While the Cisco MARS box is great, I had no reason to train on technology that I would never actually interact with. When I eventually became part of the network security team with that organization, the Cisco MARS technology had already been become obsolete and had been replaced with a different technology, which I had no training in. At that point, I realized that there was such a thing as "wasted training".
Since then, I have learned that I needed to streamline my training opportunities, in order to maximize my time with sensible, applicable training. Although I have been given a multitude of training opportunities with the organizations that I've worked with, I have learned that not all training is valuable.
In conclusion, I would advise my readers to not only take training and certifications very seriously, but to also evaluate the opportunities given to them and decide which ones they should be taking, in order to better assist them with their career in the long and short term scheme of things, while avoiding ones that are simply "wasted training."
