One benefit of working at Cisco is access to the many learning and development resources. Our learning and development org arranges hundreds of courses throughout the year. Moreover, we have a reimbursement program for external courses, conferences, books, and subscriptions to online learning programs and publications.
In the past 6 years, I have immensely benefitted from these resources. Here’s a list of the learning resources I’ve used.
- Safari books online, aka O’Reilly learning: In the past 3 years, have taken 3 online trainings and 7 books on this platform so far.
- Design thinking, 2019: A two-day course taught by consultants about how to apply the principles of design thinking to communicate and derive solutions to complex problems.
- Mindfulness, 2019: A 5-week program taught by consultants, with one hour per week, where I learned about staying mindful and effective at work amid all the chaos that surrounds it.
- Tufte one-day course, 2019: Attended a course taught by Edward Tufte on data visualization and learned about the principles that make compelling data visualization.
- SANS incident response, 2018: A packed week-long program where I learned to think like a hacker by learning about and then hacking some interesting vulnerabilities in systems.
- Cisco R00tcamp, 2017: A packed week-long program where I learned hands-on pen-testing techniques to build more secure software.
- Cisco threat-hunting, 2017: A daylong course to find root case that triggered a security threat using integrated Cisco tools, including the product I build with our team.
- RailsConf, 2015: It was a big opportunity to meet the community and bring some of their practices in-house. For example, we started using BugSnag after learning about it in the conference.