 What is the role of ongoing education and career growth and what's the parallel to that for your career maintenance perspective? Orrin also has a number of certifications and different levels of Education and formal education as well. And this is an interesting perception for formal education on on my side I learned best by hands-on and doing and then spending the time to figure it out And that's how I have to learn my wife is a very visual learner. She has to see it laid out in architectures and how that all works for her Orrin potentially is much more about the wealth of volume of reference information How to be able to interpret and decode that but I'll let you talk about specifically where you think education comes into play With the guards to our ongoing career maintenance Well, there's some jobs that absolutely require once you reach a certain stage of your career You to have a postgraduate degree to progress any further. So that's sort of relevant and sort of not because one of the questions that is Very important or one of the issues that is very important is that you need to continually refine your ability to learn Not only your willingness to pick up new technologies So we sit there and we go well and we talked about it in the last myth assess new technologies But one of the things that you should be working on throughout your career is looking at How do I learn I because it's going to be very individual and How do I become a better learner and one of the things that I learned through doing my postgraduate degrees Was that actually taught me how to scope out a project How to work on a very large project by myself and how to put together all of the information that I needed So I started out writing short articles for Windows NT magazine and then I did do my postgraduate work And I went from 5000 word essays to 30,000 word essays to eventually being able to write 250,000 word books But I learned how to learn and in my day job. I need to be able to synthesize information very quickly and then capitulate it re-present it and share it. So when you're thinking about ongoing education It can be one method of forcing you to improve How you learn because you need to work on your skills as a learner not just the skills you are learning as a learner and so Treat learning as a skill that you maintain as much as you maintain your knowledge of how to work on a particular technology Well as I mentioned the the speed at which you learn and the skills that you acquire throughout your modality of growing through this particular career path of being IT pros It potentially can change Based on how you go through and adapt to it You're talking about the progression of the amount of content that you write and again Please don't compare yourself to Oren and think you all have to become authors and things like that because he is rather Crazy when it comes to the amount of content that this man creates and actually writes That's what he's been growing up with for me. It's around How can I quickly learn something to get the nuts and bolts understanding? How can I then go to get some more depth in that particular area and apply it and synthesize it to my business environment? I'm working in and then make the evaluation as it makes sense Okay I'll just take this amount and put it my toolkit and leave it there And then I can grow it more later if I actually need to I will caveat this by saying and you probably reach this yourself I've also realized there's only a finite amount of time every day to be able to do everything, right? I'm no longer able to function as I used to function on Multiple I didn't even know what it back then that I used to drink this stuff called Jolt Cola And you remember that crap that was out there So I used to have a number of those to keep me going throughout the day and in the early evening to get stuff done Now I'm tired. So I'm tired at night. My kids wear me out that sort of stuff So okay, everybody here in the room is at TechMental. You've gone to a conference. You're being exposed to new things now a Question for yourself is what am I going to do to embed the information that I've picked up at this conference? Rick and I were talking the other day about how Rick learns through hands-on and I said, okay Here's a question for you, Rick Do you learn more by doing a hands-on lab that someone else has written or Do you learn more by writing a hands-on lab for other people to do? and Rick when I probably learned more by writing a hands-on lab by other people to do why because that's embedding the knowledge rather than just passively Following the dots when he's going through a set of instructions So that's something that you also should think about when it's not just turning up at a conference like TechMental and watching entertaining speakers That gives you the knowledge. It's also thinking about how do you embed that knowledge? So that you can actually use it at some point in the future So I guess technically this wasn't a myth. This is more of an observation with regards to how Important we all know we have to be lifelong learners in the world of IT But that that analogy just shared with going and having to teach someone else I'm sure Sammy can relate to any other speakers that are here this week can relate as well having to get up in front of a group of people to share those ideas is very It's exposing yourself to a lot of vulnerable It's opening up a lot of vulnerability because it's exposing yourself to a lot of risk And you do a lot of work to make sure that you know what you're talking about and also You respond potentially differently based on questions that you get asked to frame it a different way So that definitely comes into play as someone that does presentations and creates content for sure now This next myth is one that orange snuck in on me That we decided to keep which is Just getting older always lead to management