Youth Coaching
I am planning on completing some more coaching certifications next year. These include the USA Football 2026 Youth Tackle certification and the USA Wrestling Copper certification. I am still wanting to do Youth Football and Youth Wrestling next season. I think this will prepare me for a job that will be more beneficial for my anxiety and allow me to get back on track.
Goals in 2026
There are some goals that I have for 2026, and these include re-certifying for both my CCNA and A+. To re-certify for the CCNA, I will be working on doing the ENCC certification from Cisco. This is the CCNP level Enterprise Cloud Connectivity certification and covers cloud networking, SD-WANs, and VPNs.
I will be working on the A+ re-certification by doing the Network+ coming up in September 2026. Re-certifying for these two will drive my main goals this coming year. I also want to, as part of my training, do the AZ-104, AZ-700 and AWS Cloud Practitioner - Foundational certifications. These are some of the certifications that would be in line with the ENCC exam objectives.
Additional certifications that I will be looking at doing for the ENCC include the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, the AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty, the Google Cloud Digital Leader, Google Cloud Engineer, and the Google Cloud Network Engineer. In addition to these, there are some things like SD-WAN and VPNs that are on the exam objectives for the ENCC exam.
GSEC Studies
I will also be studying for the GSEC through five certifications that are in line with the GSEC. The five certifications that I will be doing are the Certified in Cybersecurity, Security+, CySA+, AWS Cloud Practitioner - Foundational, and the Network Defense Essentials certifications.
I have been working on some of these with additional studies; however, I want to do these five mainly at the end of 2026 or into 2027. For the certifications that I will be doing for the GSEC the Security+ is the most valuable. This will allow me to get some cybersecurity skills in addition to my computer networking skills.
Conclusion
I am starting to do more specialization-oriented skills that will make me more multi-dimensional. The ENCC might have to wait until later in 2026 as I will be studying more Azure and AWS training materials. I am also thinking about doing some Google Cloud certification prep as well. Planning on completing four or five IT Certifications and two to three youth coaching certifications.
The training for this year was somewhat unplanned, but I am adding more structure and want to work on the ENCC and GSEC certifications for 2026. There are some additional aspects of my training which include Sports Psychology, Sports Nutrition, Mental Health, Youth Coaching, AI Prompt Engineering, Docker, Kubernetes and some more Ruby programming.