IT Insights Blog — Cisco CCNA

When I drove up to my neighborhood Walmart last night and saw an abnormally crowded parking lot – I should have immediately turned my car around and sought shelter. I shrugged off the aberration and walked inside to complete my routine shopping stop.

It has been four years since the world witnessed Her Majesty The Queen jump out of a plane with James Bond. Four years since Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps dropped jaws as they achieved the impossible. Four years since the "Fierce (Fab) Five" blew audiences away with their near perfect routines, and Robert “The Hulk” Harting gifted the world with the greatest victory lap in history.

Updates and advancements abound in the realm of technology. A recent Business Insider article quoted Alphabet (Google) executive chairman Eric Schmidt saying there are six new technologies that will change the world. The list included fake meat (meat, that is, essentially grown as a vegetable from lab-engineered plants), 3D-printed buildings, virtual reality, smartphones in the medical world, self-driving cars, and machine learning in education. These advancements in technology prove the need for advancement in IT education and certification. As an IT certified professional, you might ask yourself, “How am I going keep pace with these advancements?” Well, Cisco is providing a way to stay ahead of the curve through course updates.

Is professional success based solely on your level of college education? Here is a list of people who surely would answer with an emphatic, "No." (Well, maybe one of them wouldn't. More about that in a second.) See if you recognize a couple of the names:

It wouldn’t take long for a newcomer to the internet (someone who’d been living in a cave since, oh, 2008 or so) to recognize that web users have a serious obsession with lists. What are the “17 Food Questions You Didn’t Know You Needed an Answer To,” for example, or the “Top 10 Most Venomous Snakes”? Don’t you sort of with that you knew “14 Things Every Book Nerd Can Relate to on Valentine’s Day,” or that you could brag to your buddies about your “inside” knowledge of the “10 Tales from the Production of the Original Star Wars”? The list of lists goes on and on, and increases on an hourly basis. Most of these lists will provide a reader with a nice, “Huh, that’s interesting” moment of truth and trivia, but the information is far from life changing. There is one list however that could change the course of your career: The Certification Magazine Salary Survey 75.