After the hectic work schedule in the last 3-4 months, I just managed to catch up with my personal email.

One of the email caught my attention: my 10-years-old Cisco Certification is going to expire next year. For those who are Cisco Certification followers will surely know that you will get this reminder 90 days before your certification expiry.

I am a firm believer that learning is life-long process that accompany one's life journey. We can have two flavor of ensuring our life-long learning is sharpening our skills every day. Formal and informal learning are the only two methods that I can categorize them. The -so-called- formal learning is what we commonly know as 'school' method, Be it college, universities, or any degree-earning learning stage. The -so-called- informal learning is what we commonly know as 'training'.

While we know that formal learning will increase your knowledge, informal learning are at times the helping hand that push our knowledge to practice. The terms are a bit lose here ...

For some of us, going back to 'study' will be hard, because we have made up our mindset to make the study 'hard'. So for those that are not eager to go back to school, then don't! You are just wasting your time, and also wasting the professor's time, even though the educational institution will be more than happy to get your money

For the rest of us, going back to training may sound like fun, as it applies what we (may) already know, or it will be just going back to the 'fun' part that we knew happened during our training. However, not all of us keen to attend training as it is yet-another-boring-session-like-school kind of mindset.

I have written somewhere in the old blog that 'it is all in your mind' motto that will either lock you up or set you free, at least from the mindset standpoint. Once you have made up your mind, you will then be able to decide which direction to move on: stay where you are, or pursue that path. Just like the old times when people asking whether you are taking the red pill or the blue pill. (Ah, now I remember where the motto came from, the Matrix movie!).

It seems like I may still cling on the Matrix movie idea, but all the saying, action, scene, and analogy in the trilogy made sense!

Now, back to the topic, so what should I do for the soon-to-expire certification.

My decade-long debate with myself about going back to school was due to the mindset that I made up in the past. I decided that going through training will be so much fun because I am a practical person. (By the way, some of you that know me, I am also known as the barbaric engineer - meaning: no training necessary as I already know what to do).

About the term 'barbaric engineer', as I am honing my skills, I can claimed that I am no longer a barbaric engineer

I am more on the techno-centric person that pretty much can sense what to do for ANY technology thrown at me. I still remember being asked on my 'specialty' / 'expertise' amongst my long-list of skill set that I wrote in my resume (don't ask for one if you don't want to experience a jaw-dropping finding). However, due to the broad coverage of those long list of skills, only several manage to penetrate through in the 'expert' level. But ... people tend to seek for proof, which I can only do it in practice, or during discussion, or during customer crisis, or ... basically I don't have the paper-proof that they are after.

Thus, I decided that I will pursue to get back to certification world again (and still trying to get back to school for my formal learning).

Which one will it be? Stay tuned on this website to find out!