So my company offers a program where engineers can get badges in different topics for having shown their value and their knowledge, and if you get enough badges in different categories, you can call yourself “Certified Engineer”.
It was piloted for a year and when I made my decision to trust my awesomeness and hop into engineering topics again instead of pushing timelines and budgets around, a place was just open on the right day to get into the program.
This will probably be my anchor to, in say a year, have a solid track record of me learning about new and exciting stuff. – or to show that there is enough knowledge in the back of my head to have a quick start.
The program itself is well thought out, the icing on the cake is, that you get a PluralSight License for a year.
Pluralsight allows to learn on various software engineering topics and provides regular skill checks so that you can verify your proficiency. What I liked about this a lot is, that after a skill check the system gives you hints where to improve and recommends lectures/videos to strengthen your skills.
https://pluralsight.com
The lectures have mixed quality, but most of the core topics that I explored up to now always have good videos if you hunt around a bit.
The skill checks are multiple choice tests, usually going on for around 20 questions. If you feel that you could do better, you get a second chance. Afterwards, learn a bit and come back two weeks later to retake the skill check. My feeling is that there are enough questions on the skill checks that I tried up to now so that just remembering questions will not grant you a good result, and the answer time restriction for each question is harsh enough that you cannot just google your way through it. You actually have to learn. This in my opinion makes Pluralsight better than e.g. Coursera or Udemy, where often you can google answers to course exercises and directly copy paste that over. (After having peer reviewed around 400 entries in Coursera courses, I explored the field why many entries look so identical…)
Lets see where this leads, it is a good backbone to strengthen my knowledge again.