Sohan's Blog

Things I'm Learning

Internal Trainings

design_thinking

Design Thinking course, Cisco Calgary Office, AB, 2019

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Cisco R00tcamp, 2017: A packed week-long program where I learned hands-on pen-testing techniques to build more secure software.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.