How do you get motivated to learn new material? How do you then retain that new material and apply it to your career or to earning IT certs?
Since I am debating signing up for a Masters program, I am attempting to get myself in the right frame of mind. I will not have as much free time, I’ll have deadlines, and I won’t be able to muck around on social media sites (LinkedIn is the only one I actively look at, but it’s still just as nefarious a time suck as any of the rest of them!).
The search for novelty will also need to be curtailed – I love to look at MassDrop and see what kinds of things I ‘need’ that I didn’t realize I needed! I have a robotic arm kit sitting next to me here as I write this that has not even been cracked open. This wandering and mindless buying will not work when I have tuition payments to make, even reasonable ones.
Now, I have, in the past, done many IT certifications and at one point I felt like I had a fair amount of momentum and then just lost it. When I lost it, I was not pursuing the certs for myself any longer, really, but more because I had committed to seeing them through. That ended up being an expensive mistake for me, and I still never reached the end goal with the cert in question.
Even now, I have several unread cert-related books that I’ve acquired with all the best intentions. Cloud Security – Yep, gonna be hugely important, should get these books and get certified…You get it.
What ensues is the battle between what I should be doing to be better at my job, versus what I want to be doing to stay current and be employable in the future. Both are important, but there are some times when, no matter how disciplined I am, I can’t stand to do anything related to either.
More to come.
Coolplexity 