When the Expiry Emails Stop Hurting
If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you know the ritual.
The email arrives:
“Dear Candidate, your certification will expire in 120 days. Please schedule your recertification exam…”
At the beginning of your career, that email sparks urgency. You print blueprints, book labs, buy practice exams, and block weekends. The certification means something big: entry into a specific tribe, validation that you belong.
I went through that cycle many times. Years of it.
I recertified over and over.
But at some point, something shifted.
I looked at one of those emails, and instead of feeling pressure, I felt… tired. Not tired of learning, I never stopped learning, but tired of the treadmill. Tired of the idea that every few years, someone somewhere expected me to prove, via a multiple-choice exam or lab scenario, that I still knew what I’d been doing every single day in production.
I caught myself asking:
“What exactly am I trying to prove at this point? And to whom?”
By then, I had decades of real experience behind me:
Different industries and verticals: banks, enterprises, ISPs, data centers, big techs.
Architectures that moved real money, supported real operations, kept real businesses alive.
Projects with CAPEX and OPEX numbers that made people sit up straight in meetings.
And yet, some automated system somewhere would happily mark me as “expired” if I didn’t sit a specific exam on time.
One day, I simply decided: Enough.
I stopped renewing. One by one, the badges went from “Active” to “Expired,” and you know what happened?
Nothing.
The routers didn’t explode, the MPLS cores didn’t melt, and my career didn’t collapse.
I just kept working, building, troubleshooting, and learning… exactly as before.