I started using Cisco's Skills for All platform at the beginning of this year when I decided that I wanted to get my CCNA and start making real changes for myself and my family and after investing dozens of hours into the platform (usually in the break room at my old job where I was working 50-60 hour weeks) I'm finally quickly approaching the end of my coursework for my Cisco Certified Network Support Technician (CCST) Networking certification. It's been a long year and I've learned a MASSIVE amount, not only through Cisco's training courses, but in general. I also decided at the beginning of this year to start using Linux as my primary OS instead of a secondary partition that I played around with every now and then. This eventually led to me setting up a headless server on a RockPro64 and switching to a tiling window manager so that I'm forced to do pretty much everything in the terminal. That tiling WM was qtile, which is written in Python, which I had kinda played around with at that point but it definitely made me level up my skills which eventually led me down the YouTube Python rabbit-hole (shout out to TechwithTim!) and I began eating Python with some light sides of HTML/CSS/JS or Rust for breakfast everyday for a while there. EVENTUALLY after getting distracted 17 more times with various projects I finally got back around to hitting my Cisco/Networking stuff and I'm almost there!!! Honestly, recently being let go from my forklift driving position was a blessing in disguise. When it first happened, I freaked out, set up this website, and started obsessively studying for the AZ900 (as anyone reading this probably knows, its super easy) for the next week to get any kind of IT cert under my belt, then I started hitting the books in between filling out job applications. I still don't work in tech unfortunately, but while I'm waiting for my next job to start (waiting for badge verification blah blah) I'm absolutely dominating these Cisco courses and plan on finishing this last course by the end of this week.