Expanding My Skill Set

One of the nice things about working for an EdTech company is that it's practically expected that you continually learn new things. I generally have a backlog of topics that I want to learn more about. For work, I set a goal to learn two new skills as one of my annual goals. This week, I accomplished that goal. I have picked up two new certifications in the last week.

After browsing through the catalog of options in LinkedIn Learning, I decided on the Negotiation Professional Certificate from the American Negotiation Institute. Even though I work in technology, I do try to learn non-tech or soft skills occasionally. The course covers some basic negotiating strategies and how to apply them to real world situation. It is a short form course consisting of just a few modules, quizzes, and a test at the end. I wish that the issued certificate was in a verifiable format thought.

My second certification was Harness Certified Feature Management & Experimentation Developer from Harness Inc. This one is more directly tied to my day to day activities. We are not currently using Harness FME, but it is on the event horizon. I started out going through their documentation and tutorials to see what introducing FME into our environment would look like. The transition is more complex that swapping out an SDK in our app code and copying over a few feature flags. As I was going through the documentation, I decided that taking the certification test would be a good way to quickly validate that my understanding of the platform is correct. On a positive note, the initial developer certifications are free, and they can be scheduled at anytime. There was one other bonus to obtaining the certification. The cert is also a verified credential issued from Credly.

The year is still young, and projects are still in progress. I still have plenty of time to learn new skills, and I am already lining up the next topics in the queue.