 And welcome to the Home Lab Show episode of 125, training and certifications. How you doing, Jay? I'm doing very well. How are you? I'm doing good. It's been a minute here. The schedules could not line up for me and Jay, so we kind of had to skip a couple, doing his weeklies a lot. We're gonna try to get back on cadence, but hey, things come up. There's travel plans and things like that. So that's, we didn't stop doing it. We are both very committed to continuing forward with the Home Lab Show. But this is a topic that comes up constantly, and it's kind of a headspace for Jay's at. So he said, this is a good topic, and I absolutely agree with him. This is definitely what we're talking about. And it's certifications and training, because a lot of people build their labs for this reason. It's a frequent question that comes up in the stream comments is, you know, what cert should I get and things like that? I can't exactly tell you what your career path should be, but we can certainly infer some things and talk about some training. Training is also my answer, even if you don't go for the certification part, going through a course when you go, I don't really know where to start. Well, start with one of the courses because it gives you a structured learning path to kind of go forward. And those are some of the things we're gonna talk about today. Yep, absolutely. And also, you know, it's such an overlap because of a lot of people have a Home Lab because they're literally studying for a certification. And for a lot of people, that is their gateway drug into Home Lab. So for some people, they don't really care at all. Other people that care a lot because, you know, I started my Home Lab a long time ago before Home Lab was even a term because I was going for a certification at the time. So it just has this symbiotic relationship in a way for a big part of the audience, I think. Yeah, and we'll actually start with a little bit of catching up. Is there any particular projects we should talk about that we've done lately? I know you've been deep diving on one of them. That actually will dovetail into this. This is kind of part of the reason because I was working so that we had a break. So I was on vacation because I was working really hard on this project. And every now and then, you know, working on content, you kind of need that break. So I had the break. And what I was working on in particular was, or is, I should say, because it's still not done, is my very first certification prep course, which is literally, this is the first time I've ever mentioned it in the public at all ever. So scoop. It's for the Linux Essentials exam through LPI. And it's gonna be on Udemy. It's not going to replace anything on YouTube. I wanna be clear because I know that question is gonna come up. The YouTube channel unchanged. I mean, the same content you had last month, the same style as what you're gonna get next month. My frequency kind of slowed down a bit because of producing this, but I have probably over a hundred ideas for videos. So believe me, this changes nothing on the YouTube channel. I just wanted to get that clear. This is a completely separate business endeavor. And while I was creating this, I decided that this could be a topic. And I feel like I've mentioned everything I'm gonna mention in this episode at some point in the past during the podcast, but I don't think there was like an episode that was all about this. Like you could get my opinion and know what my opinion is if you take bits and pieces of what I said, but having an episode on certifications, I think is gonna be a good fit. And also I'm thinking it'll be about two weeks when that prep course comes out. I'm guesstimating here because I'm more deviant than a boon to when it comes to releasing videos. And I think most people know what I mean by that. So I'll release it when it's ready, but it's moving really fast right now. And it's extremely fast. Like I'm already six videos into the editing process to give you an idea. So it's coming, it's coming very soon. So that being said, let's talk about certifications enough about me. I wanna talk about you guys and your certifications whether you want them or not, whether you should even get one in the first place. Do employers care about this? Are you wasting your time? Are they even worth the paper they're printed on? I mean, and then which ones do you go for? I mean, there's a lot of questions that people have here. And I have a bit of an advantage because I have been a hiring manager and involved with the hiring process for years. I was a director of operations. So I feel like it's great to come at you guys with this inside, you know, because I give that life up because I wanna teach. That's where my calling is. So I was director of operations, but now I could teach you guys about what it's like on the inside about the hiring process, what people actually care about. And give you the truth about it because I feel like I can speak about this because I've seen, you know, other coworkers on the management level that love certifications, some that hate them and think they're garbage. But then again, what's the truth? So let's get into it. So I think the first thing I wanna touch on is whether or not you should get one in the first place. And I'm gonna put, I mean, there's a couple of different hats here, but essentially what I come down to is what does the certification mean to you? Okay, I'm not talking about to your employer. I'm not talking about for your future employer. What I'm asking is what does it mean to you personally, not as of like where you're working, but what does it mean to you? And what I mean by that is what do you want to learn? What skills do you want to achieve? I mean, you can't learn everything. It's impossible, you're never going to, right? So you have to kind of pick your favorite subcategories here. So how much time do you spend on networking? How much time do you spend on, you know, server administration, Linux and all these things. And how do you get this perfect pallet on your, you know, on your portfolio? And that could be a really hard challenge because you have to pay money for these certifications and you only have a finite amount of time to study for them. So which ones do you go for? And then when it comes to employers, they either care or they don't. But when I say what does it mean to you, it's like picture your career. Like what makes you happy? Like don't think so much about what your employer wants you to be happy about. Think about what you are happy about. What makes you happy? If you had a free hour right now, I just gave you a free hour. You have an hour off work, whatever you're doing. But you have to spend that time learning something. What are you gonna spend that time on? What makes you the happiest? That's what you have to think about because if an employer likes certifications or if they hate them, then it doesn't really matter what they think if you're getting the certification for you and not for them. And it can be an incredible learning opportunity because you can have a situation where you have this amazing certification that took you a very, very long time to study for this. And then you go for a job and maybe that employer doesn't care because that employer already wrote off certifications before you walked in the door. The thing to understand about employers is that they care about what they care about. Everyone's different. You might get someone that's kind of in the middle, someone that thinks certifications are a requirement. You might have an employer that it goes, the resume goes to the desk, for example, the front desk and then the person is just looking to see if you have a certification and the conversation only goes as far as delete the ones that don't if they care about that kind of thing. But if they don't care about that thing, then you go to the next level. There's all this process of narrowing down the candidate list by each level. And sometimes it just doesn't get to the person you want it to get to because it couldn't even pass the receptionist. And at that point, it's like, okay, why did I waste my money on the certification because I can't even get past the receptionist? Well, no, you didn't waste your money because you learned something. The thing is for a lot of people, a certification represents a structure. It represents a package of things that you can learn to qualify for a thing. So you can, if you use it as a goal post, for example, like if you were to say, I'm getting into IT, I want my A plus certification, that's the first one I want. Then I want network plus, you could kind of map that out. And that's because you want to learn it. And regardless of whether or not your employer themselves are on board for that, it's a value to you because you used it as an opportunity to learn something. And some of the training resources for the certifications sometimes are way better than just the normal generic books you buy, like a generic networking book or a network plus book. I can almost promise you, like the network plus book will probably teach you more because it's, the author of that book even has to hold themselves accountable for whether or not they're teaching you everything on the list. So you have this package of things you can learn and a reasonable account of actually learning those things because it's literally required. So that's the first thing I wanted to get out of the way is to kind of figure out, is this something you even want in the first place? Because before you figure out what certifications you want, if it's not something you want in the first place, then why waste your time? So I just wanted to get that part out of the way first. Yeah, and I'll address a couple of things. First that you said, and then a couple of comments in there that are related. I'll also start with saying Tom has no certifications at all. So in case anyone's just wondering what search Tom has, that comes to the fact that Tom's never filled out a job application. Well, no, actually I can't think of any time in my life. Maybe when I worked at the car washer and I was 17, but I don't think Glenn recorded an application or Dale recorded an application then. Anyways, there's two kind of thought processes is validation of institution or acquisition of knowledge. Just what Jason is kind of reiterating here. And I seen someone say, and this is very true, especially if you're not sure how much you know, going through and getting that institutional validation can be very good as it kind of helps you with that imposter syndrome of, oh, I really do know these things. I can put these answers down and things like that. Acquisition of knowledge is mostly where I pursue things. I just want to know something because I've never had anyone ask me for certifications. Well, almost never. Mostly YouTube people ask me, but from a client standpoint, they're not asking. So there's not been a reason for me to actually bother with them. I just want to know a thing. So those certification books kind of can give me a structured path on how to learn it. Second is going to be the people asking about CCNA. One of the things we do at CNWR, why we like seeing CCNA on there, even though you may not be servicing Cisco equipment. Some people are like, yeah, some jobs require it and they don't seem to have any Cisco gear in their institution. And that's absolutely true because we know as the Cisco CCNA system has been around a long time, it's a mature, well thought out certification. And because of that, if you can pass that, you understand networking. Awesome. That's really what that's a checkbox for is if you can figure it out the Cisco way, you can, we can defer it, you know networking well enough. And from an HR or hiring standpoint, sometimes those are just easy checkboxes. There's the ebb and flow of the market. When the market is in demand, there's a lot of people needed and there's a lot of people available applying for jobs, especially for a highly skilled job in tech, they need a filter because I've talked to hiring managers that go, yeah, I got a thousand applications. What? And they're like, yeah, a thousand came in this week for a job. How do we sort them? What are the checkboxes? It's because they didn't put, I have lots of friends that work at tech companies is because they didn't put good filters on it. Like as soon as they start adding a couple checkboxes on there of you need to have at least these certs, it suddenly starts narrowing it down. It's not the best necessarily, I get it because someone and numerous people are commenting on, there's no certification for people who have critical thinking skills. You are correct. You are correct. I've watched people like, I know, and I know they have certs, but I've also watched them not understand how to Google a problem. Like they did not understand the right words to put into Google that is such an obvious thing. I'm like, being able to Google a problem should be part of the skills test. We almost need to cert for it. Like, can you Google things? Can you properly use search terms to land on the page that should give you the result of the answer to solve the problem? That would absolutely be a cool cert. Maybe I'll invent one for that. Yeah, I mean, the Stack Overflow cert would be a good one too. They have, you know, you can look things up on Stack Overflow. So yeah, complete agreement. I think at some point, you know, certifications have become trophies, like achievements in video games, how you're trying to get all the achievements in Final Fantasy XVI or something and win everything. It's like, you're in IT and each certification ends up becoming a trophy that you want to achieve and get this scorecard, but in the same way as a game. I know that's a weird parallel to make, but it kind of seems that way because sometimes I see people trying to get certifications like, you know, in bulk. In my opinion is, you know, if you have the money for that and you have the time for that, that's fine, okay? But also keep in mind, the more certifications you get, the more you have to renew. So the more it becomes a recurring job in and of itself to keep those certifications current. Some of them expire, some of them don't. So you really do need to look at that. If you're gonna get a certification, you probably don't want it to expire because you probably want to hold on to that. So what are the requirements? Do you have to recertify every two years, every three years? I think that's something to really keep in mind too, because are you gonna feel like, you know, renewing six certifications? I have nine. So believe me, the struggle's real. Like I have nine certifications on my end. So, and some of those took like three tests apiece. So at this point, I think I'm kind of like, yeah, I think I have enough. You know, at some point it becomes enough. So the other thing to think about too, I wanted to kind of reverse this a bit. What am I looking for as an employer? Okay, that's an interesting thing because I talk about what my other management co-workers are looking for and what businesses are looking for. But if you're curious what I'm looking for as a hiring manager, I want to see passion. Okay, if I see somebody that has like one really amazing certification that took multi years to get and then I see someone else that doesn't have that certification, but they have maybe three certifications that are lower, but they give me their GitHub profile or link to it or something. They show that they're working in the community if they're actually involved with things. That person's probably going to get the job over the, in my opinion, then the person that has that big certification. Why? Because this is a person in my mind that is passionate. They are paying attention to the industry. They're aware of different things. They're keeping up with the news. They show a drive to learn something. And then when that person has certifications, I don't see it as, you know, X, Y and Z perfectly. I see it as you're interested in X, Y and Z, meaning you have varied passions. And I'm going to want somebody, it's not like being a, you know, Jack of all trades master of none because there's no master in IT. There's no such thing. I mean, unless you're like hyper focused on one subject, you're not going to be a master because there's more subtopics than the brain can possibly learn in one lifetime, right? So in that standpoint, we have a finite amount of time here. So what certifications do you get? And I think at the end of the day, it's important to really map this out and understand what you're getting into. But as a hiring manager myself, I see this person as, you know, really like a technologist, someone that loves their job. I don't want the person that's good at their job, but they hate their job. I want somebody who's happy to do their job and has fun with it. And those are the things that are important to me. So yeah, certifications factor and degree factors in, but for me it's the sum of all things that matters the most, not so much any one thing that is going to stand out above anything else. So just in case anyone was curious, but that's my opinion. Any other hiring manager will probably disagree with everything I just said because we have to remember every hiring manager, she or he is an individual, period. You know, they have their own opinions and that's what you're up against. And sometimes I think this is the unfortunate side effect. You could have somebody who is way more qualified, both personality, culture and skill fit or those three things and not get the job. And somebody who is not as qualified does because the one that is more qualified got, you know, crossed off just because of the system is a horrible thing. But again, like you were saying, the problem is to get a thousand resumes. So at that point it's kind of like just have to keep applying and make sure you don't get discouraged because if it makes you feel any better, I didn't get tons of jobs I went for. And now I have this company that teaches Linux. So anybody can do it, right? And anybody can fail and everybody will fail. Every single person will fail every now and then. But you know what, you don't get the job, you go for another one because maybe something else is a better fit anyway. But above all, I think it's the fit. And then at that point, you just start looking at two into what certifications in particular you want to go for if you do decide that that's what you want to do. Something else to counterbalance that too. One of the things that we have hired on at CNWR and I've hired on at Lawrence Systems is based on people's home labs. That is definitely where they've added it to your resume and talked about things they build when under hobbies. And you're like, well, that's an impressive setup. There is someone whose job itself was not necessarily in tech. They were one of the people we hired did not actually have a technical job. And it was through their discussion, turns out they lived in the area, Jason knew them, but their technical chops of what they built was damn impressive. And we're like, wait a minute, why don't you have a technical job? Because if you're able to build this particular setup with this particular system, that takes some pretty technical skills. So it actually won them an interview of just looking at that. I've also hired someone who they're, it was kind of funny because they worked for Jimmy John's previously. And I was at the interview, they were like, I want to work here and I worked at Jimmy John's before. I'm like, what happened at Jimmy John's? And because he kind of made a sign, he's like, well, I ran into the boss's car and then I got fired. I was like, okay, so that doesn't sound well, but on his resume, Googled a couple of things because he had talked about having a GitHub. Person's a pretty big contributor to some very large open source projects, including Wikipedia, I had wrote a lot of code for it. So I actually came in for a second interview and I said, you actually didn't expand much on this. You just kind of said, I have a GitHub. And when I seen what was in your GitHub, you didn't really talk much about the projects, turned out to be one of those things. Like those are really good bold points to put on there that you understood these, you built whatever you contributed on GitHub, you helped with an open source project. Those are all huge things that can really pique the interest of someone hiring. And by the way, that person currently landed a job within a year ago at Blizzard Entertainment Writing Games. They're a hell of a developer. Like their career path is like, when the job offer came in, I said, you're my friend, I would like you to stay working here. But while I say this, your boss, I like you to stay working here, but as your friend, you're dumb if you don't take that offer, that's about eight times what I can pay you. Like, and he was a hobby developer. He developed a bunch of open source hobby games and stuff like that prior. That's what got Blizzard's attention, I think. Why are you sitting at some computer store fixing computers? But that whole thing of getting out there and putting that together is really huge. And yeah, that's, it's one of those things that it should be almost, I mean, you gotta have the basics on your resume, but it definitely should be on there. It shouldn't be buried down on the last page. By the way, I built this or work on this project or contribute to that. It's all ways to get experience because that's a lot of what we're looking for as hiring managers. We still have some experience where hoping you understand some of these things, whether it be you took some time to get passionate about the search and get them or the other side of it of, hey, you took the time to build this thing because it was a passion project for a storage server, virtualization server that you took the time to learn. That's always interesting to people hiring because those skills can usually translate directly. One of the other guys I hired, the whole counter, we spent, most of his time talking about how he hacks phones and like modifies them. Hack as in like Roots Android does a bunch of a lot of custom stuff, turned into a fun discussion topic on there because he had put, he didn't have much to say about it on the resume, but when I asked the question, it turned into a big discussion topic and I realized how passionate he was for tech. Yep, absolutely. I wanted to, before I move on to the next thing I wanted to talk about, I wanted to just bring up something, a comment in our chat room here, asking if we could please talk about ageism and tech hiring. I would absolutely love to talk about that. It's an absolute honor to talk about it because it's something I've run into. It's a problem. Sexism and ageism are absolutely problems. I mean, it's not even debatable, okay? I've seen it. So it's kind of one of those things that's really hard to say what to do about it because these problems shouldn't even be problems in the first place. So it's kind of like anyone that hires based on age alone or any other factor is just on the wrong side, period. And my standpoint, the way I hired it was, or not hired it, the way that I went through this or went along with this is just, I make the decision, that's the best decision, not keeping in mind like age doesn't matter, gender, none of that. It's like the person's a fit, they're a fit and I hire them anyway, regardless of whether someone thinks it's, I should or shouldn't. A good example of this is I hired this woman who was hiring into an assistant job and she was just the perfect fit. There's just no question about it. Like she knows everything she needs to know. She's extremely brilliant, cloud, physical hardware, you name it. And she was older, but I don't know how old. I never looked at her birthday. Why? I don't give a crap. I don't care when she was born. That doesn't factor in anything. So the fact that at this job, it actually came up that she's a woman and she's older as a problem. And I got extremely angry and I said, this is my choice and this is who I'm picking, period. I'm not gonna be swayed on this, we're not one bit. And that's the only way I could go against it. And now that person is still at the job and one of the most celebrated people at that company and was promoted at least twice. So the only, so it's really hard. I know the struggle is real, especially considering, I'm a bit younger here, so I don't really have the same experience, but I have the experience from the other side and you just have to keep going. You have to bang that drum. If you feel like there's something happening and it wasn't like you didn't get the job and it wasn't because you were qualifications. In my opinion, the only thing I could say is bang the drum. But in my opinion, like that has no place in my company and it shouldn't have any place with anyone. It's a legal hearing in the United States. I'm sure there's similar laws in other countries. One solution to the problem and I don't know what their status is today, but years ago there was a book about how Google hires people. And I found it really interesting because the way they structure and hire people was with a double blind system. They get the details of the resume but there's nothing on there to identify the person. Like there's no graduation times for things. They do anything, they don't secure all of it. So when you say I'm requesting HR intakes people but then when it's handed to the people who make the hiring decision, you are obscured from that. You get a series of resumes that have assigned numbers to them. That's it, there's no name. So you can't even deploy things by the name. It's a really clever process. They covered it. There was a book I read years ago that someone wrote about that facet of it. I thought it was really interesting because I think that's a great way to do things where we just kind of take out some of these and we kind of abstract that. The only time you find out much about the person is when you've narrowed down the resume. But they also have questionnaires. These people fill out, they have an entire, it's not just like here's a resume but there's also questionnaires so they can figure out whether or not you're a fit to work in the engineering team at Google. They give you a lot of puzzles to solve. You know, my friend who went on to work for Blizzard and immediately he worked for another developer company. When he came in for the interview, they said, you don't get to actually interview today. They're like, why? They're like, here is a coding problem. Here's what we need you to solve. Here's a keyboard. And they also, he said it was weird because he was in there with, I think he said nine other people at the same time. They had nine computers. Well, they had more set up and nine people set down, take the test. He goes, some people got up within the first minute and said, I can't actually do what you're asking and left. But they had technical challenges. Like you said, you know these things. So before you actually go through the interview, solve for X, sit down and do some of these things. But Google has, I think that type of process. I know Google's not the only company doing things like that. I'm just one that came up as an example in my head. But there are things some companies are doing, but the problem is that's hard to do when you're a smaller company. So that's kind of pie in the sky if you're trying to hire in at CNWR. So we don't have enough people to do a whole, obscure the resume and hide who the person is. Cause there's just a few of us, there's only about 30 people working at CNWR. So we, because when we're hiring at CNWR, we have to go through the resumes and things like that. But we follow all the laws. We're very clear on that. All of us are very much, we'll hire the best candidate, but we're not going to discriminate. Cause, hey, look, it graduated in 1971. We're not going to judge anyone by that. We try to make sure we have the best candidate for the job. Yep, absolutely. And another similar comment that came up, that I just want to acknowledge this, that basically what Ellison is saying is that if there's a reason you're not hired, that's because of like discrimination or race, genders, you know, sexuality, whatever it is, they're not going to come out and say that, right? Because when it's illegal, it's like they're not going to say that that's why they didn't hire somebody cause they don't want to lose their job. They're just going to say, oh, they weren't a culture fit or, you know, something else. So I do want to acknowledge that, but one, my response to that though is, as much as it hurts to have this happen, if someone crosses you off because of something like this, that company doesn't deserve you in the first place, period. Because if that kind of thing was, yeah, if that kind of thing, right, if that kind of ageism, sexism, you know, company that's a, you know, homophobic or something or whatever it is, I mean, that you don't want to work for them anyway, because if you are not a fit for no fault of your own, then honestly, I kind of feel like they're doing you a favor. I know that's not what anyone wants to hear, but you don't want to work for a company like that. What if you did suffer ageism and you did report it, and it was found that you are correct, and they did take action and then they hire you, but do you want to work there now? I mean, do you? Like if it took all of that, just to get them to realize that ageism was happening, then honestly, I think somewhere else might just be a better place to work. This is a little key. If we keep going down this road, it'll definitely be on this topic, but it's definitely illegal. It is what it is. There's plenty of other people who dove deeper into this topic. There's movies about it and things like that, so. So the next thing I wanted to cover was, yeah, I'm so sorry about that. No, no problem. I think it absolutely should be a topic in terms of that we all agree we should be no discrimination. I just don't know how to fix the problem in the big picture. Me and Jay don't have that kind of pull in the market. The way I'll say is that we can't control karma, but karma does have a way of fixing things. Sometimes it does. Yeah, I think it does. So moving on from that, okay, if you decided to get a certification, now what? There's so many of them. I mean, have you even seen a list of certifications? I mean, I haven't this year, but I remember the last time I looked it was the same. I mean, you're not going to get all of them. And even if you did, like I mentioned, you have to renew these. I mean, you're never going to have time to actually do your job at that point that you got from the certifications. You won't even have time to do your work. And I'll fully admit, majority, we have a lot of people who have certifications at the office, and the majority of them have let them lapse. And we're fine. We don't push that they got hired. They had them cool. They've let them lapse. Actually, we, because we support training, I think I have a handful of people who got their certifications while they were working for CNWR as well. We definitely support people doing that. But it's one of those, once we know they know the knowledge, and we actually have a whole lot of guys who aren't going to bother renewing their VMware, but I think that might be for another reason. Yeah, I mean, that is the point because we do have to keep in mind what the overall health of the certification is, like the company that it's for, like, we can't really detect these things too, because it's not like Broadcom is going to say, oh, by the way, we're going to buy out this company in a year. We're going to screw everybody. Just to let you know ahead of time, that never happens. So it's not like we're going to say, oh gosh, I shouldn't get that certification because they're going to screw everyone over in a year. Nobody knows that. But if you kind of detect that, something isn't really quite right. Like the install numbers are dropping like really high or there's just something egregiously wrong. Just have a quick look at the health of the community at least, but again, there's nothing we could do to predict something like that because even in my position, in you and yours, I mean, at most we might know a couple of days ahead of time is something leaks and we're paying attention to our RSS feeds, but we find out pretty much exactly whenever one else does. So for the most part, I mean, that's kind of like how it goes there, but what certification do you get? So obviously if you're into Linux, I'm going to recommend Linux Professional Institute or LPI. Now, obviously I did mention that I'm coming out with the course. So again, disclaimer here, but at least have a look at it. I have been in contact with the people at LPI for probably two years now. Like we're pretty much on a first name basis because they're so cool and they're so passionate and they really care about this and it really comes out in a call with them because they really wanna get this right. And they're really proud of the fact that they're certifying as many people as they're certifying. And taking my company hat off, I went through their certifications and it was an amazing process. They're very challenging. So I'm, because they need to be, but bring your A game to those certifications, but I think I had the most fun with their certifications and any other. But before you even go that route, another one to look at is Linux Plus by CompTIA, which in the past, I don't know if this is still the case, but when I got mine, which was probably over a decade now, so I'm sure it's changed, but there's other certifications that qualified. So I had like LPIC-1, which is the first level of LPI certifications as a, I was just awarded that because Linux Plus is considered equal to that. So if you could pass one, you could pass the other because they test the same thing. In fact, I think even at one point, LPI was providing the questions for the Linux Plus exam. So there's quite a bit of overlap. So it's like, sometimes you get one certification and it'll get you another one. You just have to like send it to them or apply or something like that. So just keep that in mind that you might get a two for one deal if one certification is honored by another. So I don't know if that's still true of Linux Plus and LPIC-1, but if it is, there's no reason to take LPIC-1 if it could take Linux Plus and get LPIC-1 in addition because if you take the other, you only get the one. So you kind of look at that. When it comes to other certifications, the problem is there's just so many of them. I personally don't like CCNA. It's just a personal opinion, no offense to anyone. Like it's a good certification. It takes a lot of skill to achieve it and the people that have it are brilliant. It's just sometimes when things are so specific to like one kind of firmware on one kind of switch or something like that is that particular brand. It's, I just feel it's better to get like a network Plus, which obviously is a much lower level, but it's like you have more of a worldview than just knowing that one switch or that one router. Do you agree with that? I've actually never got a chance to ask you that before. Like I said with the Cisco one specifically, one of the things I really like about it is so much of what Cisco has done because they were so there in the early days of networking is they talk about things that other companies have just kind of echoed into their systems. So anytime you are dealing with a CLI, we always refer to many of the CLIs as Cisco-like because they'll often copy almost the same type of commands. So the interpretation from I learned Cisco, but now I'm doing it on insert other name of switch is actually not that far to pivot from. That's one of the reasons that people like it going, oh yeah, you got your Cisco certification? Great, you're not gonna find this switch that much different in practice. Here's those couple of commands. You're gonna add this extra slash, you're gonna do this little thing that is like nomenclature difference, but the command line is actually very similar. Matter of fact, the whole Cisco concept of the running versus the save config, that's propagated on for most of the command line switches where we have the running config, but then we have to commit it to the save config so it's available on boot. Those same structural concepts because they've been transferred over, it makes it easier for people to pursue that. One of the things I'm gonna throw into the show notes is they, I know because I'm on the board with Camtia, if anyone didn't know, but I'm not on the certification side. I'm on the thought, what do they call that? I'm part, well, I was part of an ISAO, now I'm moving over to you. I know what you're talking about too. Yeah, yeah, I'm on the other side where we do certifications for companies, which is different than doing certifications for individuals. I'm doing the trust mark plus, I'm part of that team now, but back to the topic here, actually for anyone watching it, I did get an award from Camtia that I'm holding up in the video here. Yeah, it didn't focus though. No, it didn't focus. This is- It didn't focus on the text. If you pull it away from- Yeah, well, no, it'll actually focus if you have it on the camera. There we go. Really, there it goes. Yep. For the people that are watching live or on video. Yeah, anyways, this is because I was on the ISAO Committee for Cybersecurity, other side of Camtia. But what I'm gonna throw in the show notes here is there's a really good career path certification path. We get to know about all the other Camtia things going on on the other side of the house, which does include a really nice chart they made for all the different certs and how it can flow through your career, like where you start and where it shifts over. It's actually a really cool graphic they put together that has all the different certifications listed on there because there are, and I'm gonna read a few of these off here. You have your certification roadmaps. You've got your basic Camtia A plus ITF project plus. Project plus is more important than you think. Understanding how to manage tech projects is definitely not a thing you should take lightly. That is a good certification to get for sure. They also have project plus. They also, I'm saying these project ones because any one of these for software development, IT service management, infrastructure and cloud cybersecurity, each one actually has a recommendation that you get some of the basic project management skills on there. From there, they have all the career paths that you can go into for your security plus, server plus, if you're a server admin, they also have cloud plus and then they start mentioning the non in here as well, the non Camtia ones. So you have your RHCE, your LPIC2, CCNP, those are all in here as well. So I'll just drop this in the show notes right now because I think this is something to really look at. So you can kind of go, okay, what if I want to be at the end? They have all the different certification or different landings for what your career might be, whether it's IT management, developer, network engineer, but then they have all the different paths in between and they also have the forks of where you can start at one path and fork over to the other because there's a common level of beginner search that kind of our base level like that project one. Yeah, that Camtia is really good. I love them. I have, see which ones do I have? A plus, network plus, server plus, security plus, Linux plus, those are the ones I have off the top of my head of theirs. And I think there's a few more I wanted, but then I just decided to go to a different vendor after a while because I just taken their tests one after another. But I love the process of learning because I feel like network plus and Linux plus are probably the two that I learned the most from during the process when I was, because this was a very long time ago. Well, they're in a century long time ago, they learned a lot from those. Yeah, and having that foundational knowledge helps you a lot. Matter of fact, if you don't know what to do in tech, starting with the foundational knowledge helps because you're gonna get this broad stroke of things and you're gonna go, you know what, networking turns out, I hated it. Programming turns out I loved it or some other concept that you find out of there. Not that you're gonna learn how to program from a network plus, but you'll figure out what you do or don't like or maybe you hate touching hardware. I found people that go, man, I don't wanna deal with any of the hardware side of what you learn in A plus. That's just not interesting to them. You know what's interesting to me that you brought that up because when I took network plus had a very good effect on me. So before I took it, I thought network administration was the driest, most boring looking job I've ever seen in my life. Like I would see someone, like going through the switch config, I'm like, oh my God, how does that person even stay awake while they're doing this? That's boring. But when I study for the network plus exam and I got my hands on, I'm like, I love this. I adore this. I love everything about this. I'm obsessed with this. And it awakened something in me where I was judging a job based on seeing other people do it. I haven't actually done it. But when I get my hands on it and I look at the logic behind the routing and some of the things and cool stuff that they're doing. And then I learned to do that stuff. Now I probably spend more, almost as much time on network stuff, as Linux stuff at this point. Like it's that much of a value of interest to me. So sometimes you could have a certification that might actually awaken something in you. And I think that's so cool when someone discovers something that they love that they didn't or might not have discovered otherwise. Yeah. And it's always interesting to me is I meet a lot of people that have never touched hardware and they've worked in tech for a long time. I friend to our high level, well-paid reverse engineers and they can take a part of binary. They can really do the CISSP. They have all the different cybersecurity search. They do a great job. They've never touched hardware and they've never even racked a server. And when I saw at home lab, they're like, they seem, one of them was a local friend and just like, it's so different to him. He's just never touched physical. He's never plugged in network cables but has a hell of a career as a cybersecurity professional. He's really talented at his job. He just never has to think about like the physical layer. It's just not, it's not something he, he didn't skip over that. There's, it always surprised me as you can completely have that gap of knowledge. You're like, I don't know. A lot of cables, I'm sure they do something important. Yeah, sometimes I feel like it's, it's doing it that can make the difference because sometimes I wonder if it's like, you're watching someone do it as one thing, but actually doing it as another, like the, like, like, kind of like how some people like emulating classic games, but for other people, they like the physical cartridge that goes into the system and they, they, they need that. But looking at 2J is the first thing. Some people want like a physical network connection. They want to plug into a jack and they want to connect physical switches that they can see and actually plug in computers on either side of it and then try to transfer data from one to the other and try to make it faster than the previous file transfer. Maybe you find you can eliminate a route and maybe that could help a little bit. But you start getting into this and getting your hands on it. I feel like that's the only way sometimes for some people to really know if they like it or not. Yeah. And I was kind of joking because if anyone doesn't know J's into not just simulators, but actual hardware, J has quit the collection. We've mentioned a couple of times before. Should we do a couple? Yeah, if you have an Atari Jaguar, raise your hand. Yeah, should we do a, I love the technology. I especially love failed technology. I have no idea why. It's like sometimes what could have been so having an Atari Jaguar, I have almost the entire library. It's like this system could have been successful but it wasn't. Sometimes it's like my virtual boy. Anyway, that's all other conversation. I feel like there's a, there's probably a homelab, like overlap of retro gaming. I should find it for an episode. Yeah, well, we'll read it around because we can both talk passionately about it. Why you need to build your retro gaming lab? Is that our next episode? I don't know, it could be. It could be. Let us know in the comments. Yeah, that could be it. Send us an email. The homelab show, it's feedback at the homelab show. I said that wrong. Yeah, that. I didn't put that up there. Feedback at the homelab.show. If you would like to have us do a retro emulation talk. Yeah. That would be fun. I would be honored to do that. But the homelab angle, of course, we'll make it right. Oh yeah, we'll make sure. We'll find a way to tie it back because I think there's the Venn diagram of people who are watching this show and listen to us and that probably have some emulators for some reason in their lab. It's a circle. We're close to it. Close to it. Yeah, so yeah. All right. Well, I left anything else. I think we covered this topic pretty well here. Is there anything else we have to add to it or? I would say just one last thing. You know, someone says they have 20 years in tech and no certs. What value is that in 2024? I would say that's extremely valuable because 20 years experience, there's not a universe in which I wouldn't consider that like huge and needs to be considered. So yeah. So people misunderstood my merger video when I did that and why I'm bringing that up because as I mentioned at the beginning, I have no certifications. What I do have is a merger video I did in July of 2023 and job offers that came in in July of 23. People didn't understand merger. They said, oh, Tom, so you sold your business? Would you like to come work for us? Oh, I should have known that would happen. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's other companies I've engaged with. I won't name any names here, but it's some big companies. I said, you need a job, Tom. You seem to be unemployed. Did you sell your company? Congratulations on your sale. And it was like, I would open emails because they congratulate you selling your sale. Hey, we have a job offer for you. So yes, trust me, 20 years experience in the market will definitely, when people know that you have the experience and I guess I would say they probably knew me from my YouTube channel or I've used their products. But yeah, the job offers came in, which I thought was kind of an amusement. I said, no, no, no, I'm not retiring. I'm just gonna make more content. They're like, would you like to work for us and make content? I'm like, oh, no, I'm gonna make just content for myself. So. I think it was between eight or 10 years of experience that, and being on LinkedIn with eight or 10 years experience back when that's all I had, that was like, that alone was enough to make the headhunters pretty much contact me like three to four a day at that point. So the more your years stack up, if people can find you, they'll find you. Yeah. My first tech job was in 1996, 95 or 90s, 95 I think. So yeah. So I've been doing this, I've been doing this for a minute. I've had my business for, this is 21 years now. I've had my company. So that's, that experience, especially experience and people know you've been doing something in the market. If I were to put a resume together, it'd be a lot to put on there for projects that I worked on over the years. And that's what employers are looking for. Oh, cool. This person, especially because I've managed a lot of projects. In fact, what I mentioned at CompTIA, this is something we've actually have people who got their project plus certification because we know how much it helped them at their job of being able to manage it. It's not just you fixing a technical problem. A lot of times you have to work with others. And if you are someone who can actually call others to action, to organize and divide up and slice it up to a project that's manageable by a team, that has great value to companies. That's how you land your seat in management of these technical people. If you know the tech that needs to be done, actually in most people, most technical people enjoy working for a manager with a technical background. Because the manager isn't possible. They understand the technology. Technical leaders that can pivot that to actually be good at managing people. By the way, that's not me. That's the reason I sell my company. I don't, managing people, turns out I could do the project plus all day. It doesn't make me any better at managing people. So yes, that is a definite thing to put on your resume. Have it as your career path and note that on there. Yep, absolutely. Ah, fun stuff. Tom has a very particular set of skills. Skills he's acquired over a long career. Yes, I like that in the comments. Jada's too. It doesn't even feel that long to me. Doesn't even feel that long. I can't believe my hair is long, I get this old. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I have the years of experience I have because things always feel new to me because there's always something new to learn. So at no point do I ever feel like I'm not new, even though I'm not. That's just a weird side effect. It's like, yeah, it's a cool thing though. I mean, you've known each other since I think 2016, I think is when we met. I know it was at PenguinCon. No, it was before that because it would have had to have been 2014 or 15. Okay. It was at PenguinCon. That's all I remember. Yeah. I know where I'm gonna tell the story because it's so funny. The first thing, Tom, the first thing you ever said to me, did I ask some guy at PenguinCon? I'm like, who knows cameras? I have a question because I was so fumbling with my stuff. And then someone introduced me to you and you had a tip and you said, well, when you mess up, just say the F word like really, really loud because on the wave form. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The spike's on the top and you know, right where to go to take out your air because there's no mistaking that spike when you say something loud. I'd settled for a loud clap but it still would have worked all the same. And I think it was some trivia because the other, the thing I most remember about meeting Jay wasn't the camera thing. You showed up to our, I was doing the Sunday morning Linux review back then, this is actually, and Jay later joined us. Oh yes, that was the second or third time, I think. Yeah, and what you had done, you were the only one to have like all the answers. Not everyone knows this. There are code names for Linux kernels and this is not something a lot of people know. They're great if you look them up. I mean, in fact, I recommend everyone go Google Linux kernel code names. By the way, first you didn't know they existed. We thought it'd be a hard trivia question. Turns out Jay knows them. If I remember correctly, I answered every question and I kind of, no, there's one question I didn't get right. I don't know why I remembered this. Like for some reason I've never heard of the yes command in my entire life and until that day, until that quiz. That was one I got wrong, but everything else, like the code names, it was hilarious because I felt bad because the other person I was against, he's like, you asked him like, if you have an answer, he's like, well, what's the point? I'm like, oh man, I feel so bad. It was so funny in retrospect. We'll leave you with that with this. Thank you for joining us on this show. We'll leave you with some Linux code names. They're fun. Just look them up. Trivia memories, yeah. Yeah, trivia memories. Memories of the Sunday morning, that was a fun thing we did for a number of years. It just didn't work out anymore. So we stopped doing it, but it was fun. We all had a great time doing that, talking to Linux. So that's what we brought in. Matter of fact, our desire to do something more homelab and broadly related is what led us to doing the homelab show. So I'll see you as soon as we get the next episode. We'll see if we got time to do one about retro gaming. Me and G will noodle that around. So thanks everyone for joining and take care. Yep.