Of course, skill improvement depends primarily on the person and their commitment, but my experience is that I had a lot more opportunities to expand the skillset in the company where I previously worked. How much do you think you have managed to expand your skillset while working at Cisco?
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I cannot remember anything I picked up working here, all my skills improvements came from doing code challenges at hackerrank, leetcode etc. We have nice hobby sharing such interesting interview tasks between my friends, so at many times it gives a good training
Typical Cisco Manager tells you (morning) to read a book, as part of quarterly review.
That evening, Cisco Manager asks for status update.
"Did you read the book?"
Next morning, Cisco Manager says (s)he has to give a status.
"Did you read the book?"
So, I said yes I read the book, and updated my resume.
I have never seen such awful management, in my entire career, as the managers at Cisco.
Cisco gives plenty of opportunities to learn. You get access to Udemy for business, Safari publications, ...
Cisco hires people with work visas that make less money than you and they tell you to 'read a book'.
If reading a book was enough to learn something, why do we need college degrees? Why do colleges have "professors"? They could save so much money if they got rid of classrooms and teachers and just sold you books. Oh, wait, they still wouldn't lower tuition fees, they'd just make bigger profits.
I had a manager once give me a review and then tell me that he would pay for a book if I wanted to learn something new as part of process improvement. He was writing TCL for his past few companies and still using TCL at Cisco.
I am a Java Python/C++/Javascript Developer.
I had to laugh.
Cisco hires people with work visas that make less money than you and they tell you to 'read a book'.
So glad I left Cisco.
Where do you work at Cisco? Most managers I've interacted with are focused on politics/promoting themselves and be little employees interested in learning.
Cisco gives plenty of opportunities to learn. You get access to Udemy for business, Safari publications, lots of good sandboxes to play with on devnet, public cloud accounts with runOn, and other relevant internal classes (Python, K8s, mobile app dev, etc.). Now it all comes down to the individual's motivation. If you are looking for your boss to tell you what to focus on and learn, you're not going to be very pleased. Most managers focus on processes and other nuisances and as a result have lost track of technology.
In Cisco you don't need to expand your skills because they don't count. All you need is to come from the same village as your director or being the relative of some VP's. Today our group just welcomed a new director who has neither the experience nor the skills in what we do and deliver.
After being a kick-@ss software engineer for years, Cisco's Woke People Deal has provided me with the skills to be a diversity and inclusion manager.
Don't take the internal Cisco classes. Most of those are like Russian reeducation propaganda programs. You'll convert to scientology within a week.
"Cisco is the number 1 technology company"
"Cisco is the number 1 place to work"
"Cisco is the number 1 cloud company"
It depends on at whose expense. If you're willing to pay for training, or can find adequate online for free, most people certainly have enough free time at Cisco to take classes and study new stuff.
If you want Cisco to pay for it, they barely provide 40 hrs per year and the topic of study has to directly benefit the team's required skillsets, not necessarily yours.
I need to get off my a$$ and learn more Python. The Python 101 course I took looks nothing like the Python work the team of developers I work with are doing. It reminds me of learning to play the guitar. My teacher was teaching me single notes first while everyone else is playing chords.
This is specific to the individual. If they are driven to keep challenging themselves to learn. In my case, I expanded upon my skillsets tremendously in a 2–3 year period. So much so that it made me attractive to a recruiter from FAANG...and there was the end of my career at Cisco. C'est la vie!