My standpoint on technical certifications is a mixed one, and it mostly depends on several factors. Does your industry require you to have it? Is your company asking you to get certified? Is it the pursuit of knowledge or merely just compliance with a component of peer pressure? Are you sure you’re getting the most value out of it? I’ll do my best to answer these questions in this post today.
There’s a trap most customers fall into and it’s the result of many years of companies using marketinesque language. It’s the Trap of Product Commoditization. What is it about? It’s when you pick a product based on its brochure features, among many other products that are apparently the same. So you might make your choice based on price or any other economical factor (Discounts perhaps? Free professional services the entire year? Free additional licenses?)
COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.
What would you tell a prospective customer when he tells you they are looking for the cheapest rate freelancer to develop a relatively complex web application? On top of that, the prospective customer also asks you to recommend a Community Manager to post once or twice a day on the social media accounts of the so-called company (which happens to not even exist yet).
Taken at face value, you might get discouraged to work with this person, but have you ever thought why? Have you thought deeply about what is enraging of this example situation? Let’s discuss a bit more about this topic.
This is one of these entrepreneurial pitfalls that, once you come across to realize you have been doing it wrong all this time, the business perspective of your ideas gets shaken like a 9.0 Richter earthquake. Such an incredible realization could only come from the simplicity of business processes and value-adding approach to work.
What would you think if I told you that ignorance and knowledge are actually knitted together? While we don’t perceive knowledge and ignorance as to the same thing, knowledge and ignorance are basically the pieces that enable us to participate in the information exchange market.