IT Engineer Switching CCNA to Data Science to Hacking: Why Creating Without a Plan Fails

    An IT engineer's jump from CCNA to data science to ethical hacking looked like ambition. It was actually the Creating quadrant of the Wheel of Change without discipline — and it's a trap I see in almost every corporate training room.

    IT Engineer Switching CCNA to Data Science to Hacking: Why Creating Without a Plan Fails

    IT Engineer Switching CCNA to Data Science to Hacking: Why Creating Without a Plan Fails

    I've sat across the table from this person more times than I can count — bright, capable, and completely scattered. This time it was a young IT engineer who started a CCNA certification, dropped it for data science because a friend was excited about it, and then abandoned data science too, calling it dull, in favour of an ethical hacking course. A year later, he had three half-finished skills and zero certifications. This is the story I use to teach the Creating quadrant of the Wheel of Change, and it is one of the most common productivity traps in Indian IT careers today.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    The Wheel of Change is Technique #2 in the Productivity chapter of Stars at India Inc., which means it lives on the PQ — bottom — side of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). EQ gives you self-awareness, RQ gives you the relationships that open doors, but PQ is what converts intention into output. A kite with weak PQ still has good instincts and good people around it — it just never gets off the ground, because every gust of new interest pulls the string in a different direction. That is precisely what happened to this IT engineer.

    The Engineer Who Kept Starting Over

    He came to one of my corporate sessions somewhere in the middle of his CCNA prep. Cisco's networking certification is not a weekend course — it demands months of structured study, hands-on lab practice, and a fair amount of patience with subnetting tables that make your eyes cross. He was three months in, moving at a reasonable pace, when a friend messaged him about data science — the salaries, the demand, the AI boom everyone was talking about.

    That was enough. He put CCNA aside "for now" and started data science from scratch. New books, new online courses, a new identity as a "data science aspirant." For a while it felt exciting — the way anything new does in the first few weeks. But data science has its own grind: statistics, Python fundamentals, endless practice datasets that don't feel like they're going anywhere. A few months in, the sheen wore off. He decided data science was "dull," and pivoted again — this time to ethical hacking, drawn by the thrill of the subject and, if I'm honest, probably another friend's excitement or a viral video.

    By the time I met him, more than a year had passed. He had touched three serious, career-defining skill tracks. He held zero certifications. He couldn't speak with depth about any of the three — just enough surface knowledge to sound informed in a conversation, not enough to put on a resume with confidence. And worse, his own belief in his ability to finish anything had quietly eroded.

    The Wheel of Change: Four Quadrants, One Missing Piece

    The Wheel of Change was developed by renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, and I teach it because it does something most self-improvement advice doesn't — it forces you to first identify what kind of change you're attempting before you attempt it. The wheel works on two axes: positive to negative, and change to keep. Together they create four quadrants.

    1. Creating

    This quadrant is about introducing positive changes into your behaviour or routine — reinventing yourself or discovering a new side of you. Joining a gym, trying a new diet, enrolling in a certification course — these are all acts of Creating. In your professional life, Creating might mean improving your presentation skills or picking up a tool that makes your work sharper. Think of a cricketer developing a new delivery — off-spinner Harbhajan Singh crafting his famous "doosra," or a fast bowler adding a slower ball to his arsenal. Each new skill reinvents the player and helps them stand out.

    But here is the catch, and it is exactly where our IT engineer went wrong: Creating must be a conscious choice that aligns with your overall goals. It cannot be reactive. An IT engineer preparing for a CCNA certification who gets distracted by a friend's excitement over data science, switches subjects, and then decides data science is dull before pivoting to ethical hacking — that is not Creating. That is drifting. Creating that isn't steady and purposeful will not yield results, no matter how much energy goes into each individual switch.

    2. Preserving

    This quadrant is about maintaining the positive aspects of your behaviour that are already working. It can feel unglamorous — a morning ritual of pranayama or journaling, a sales team's habit of giving customers personal attention, a fast bowler like Glenn McGrath sticking relentlessly to his consistent line and length. Even Bill Gates, who reads roughly fifty books a year, shows that preserving a hunger for learning is what keeps you at the top over decades, not any single dramatic leap.

    3. Eliminating

    This is about removing negative habits that hold you back — even habits that once served you. A manager who micromanaged their way to early success but now stifles their team's growth needs to eliminate that instinct. A sales head clinging to an outdated reporting format after the company expands into new regions, or a project manager still using pen and paper instead of a modern ERP system — these are habits that must go, even though they once worked.

    4. Accepting

    The hardest quadrant. Acceptance means making peace with the parts of yourself you cannot change immediately. When a boss gives mixed feedback, we tend to cling to the praise and ignore the criticism. In business, leaders often refuse to accept poor financial results, preferring to imagine better performance ahead rather than confront what the numbers are actually saying. As Stephen Covey advised, work within your circle of influence — accept what you cannot change while acting decisively on what you can. Acceptance is not surrender; it is clarity that makes real improvement possible.

    Why This IT Engineer's Creating Failed

    Go back to the story. Every single switch he made was, in isolation, a reasonable act of Creating. CCNA is a legitimate, high-value certification. Data science is one of the most in-demand skills in the country. Ethical hacking is a genuinely exciting, well-paying specialisation. There was nothing wrong with any of his three choices on their own merits.

    The failure was in the sequence and the trigger. He never asked himself: what career outcome am I building toward? Is this switch driven by my own five-year plan, or by someone else's enthusiasm bumping into my Monday-morning boredom? Creating, like a business strategy, should not be changed too frequently — change it too often and it becomes ineffective, no matter how sound each individual version of the strategy was.

    This is where I always bring in the case of the England cricket team, which I also cover in this chapter. After a crushing 2013–14 Ashes defeat to Australia, coach Peter Moores identified four areas for improvement — mindset, environment, culture, performance — and applied all four Wheel of Change quadrants deliberately. In the Creating quadrant specifically, the team didn't randomly try new things; they introduced positive-thinking and visualisation practices in service of one clearly defined goal: winning back the Ashes. They did — in 2015. The difference between England's Creating and our engineer's Creating wasn't energy or ambition. It was purpose.

    How to Apply This at Work Starting Monday

    If you recognise yourself in this story — and in my training rooms across IT, banking, and manufacturing floors, a large number of people do — here is what I ask them to do before they touch another course platform:

    I train teams on this exact discipline in our Signature Corporate Training Programs, because unfinished skills are one of the quietest productivity leaks in Indian corporate careers — quiet because nobody puts "started and abandoned three certifications" on their appraisal form, but everybody's manager notices the pattern eventually.

    The Larger Lesson

    Daniel Goleman's research on emotional intelligence often gets cited for self-awareness, but there's a productivity parallel worth borrowing here: knowing yourself well enough to tell the difference between genuine ambition and borrowed excitement is itself a form of intelligence. The IT engineer in this story wasn't lazy. He wasn't unintelligent. He was simply Creating without anchoring it — and the Wheel of Change exists precisely to catch that gap before a year disappears into it.

    The Wheel of Change is not about overhauling your life overnight. It's about knowing, quadrant by quadrant, whether you should be Creating something new, Preserving something that already works, Eliminating something that no longer serves you, or Accepting something you cannot change today. Get that classification right, and even modest, steady effort compounds into real skill. Get it wrong — the way our IT engineer did — and ambition itself becomes the obstacle.

    If you want to go deeper into how Productivity, Emotional Intelligence, and Relationship Intelligence work together to hold up real career success, explore the full Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework), or browse our corporate training topics for the workshop format that fits your team.

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    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the Wheel of Change in Stars at India Inc.?

    The Wheel of Change is a self-improvement tool developed by executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, which Avinash Chate teaches as Technique #2 under the Productivity (PQ) side of the Winning Kite. It divides behaviour change into four quadrants — Creating, Preserving, Eliminating, and Accepting — so you know exactly what kind of change you are attempting before you attempt it.

    What happened to the IT engineer who kept switching skills?

    An IT engineer began preparing for a CCNA networking certification, then got distracted by a friend's enthusiasm for data science and abandoned CCNA halfway. After some months, he decided data science was "dull" and switched again to an ethical hacking course. Each switch felt like progress, but because none of the switches were tied to a clear, purposeful goal, he ended up with three half-finished skills and no certification to show for over a year of effort.

    Why does Creating fail without a clear purpose?

    Creating is meant to be a conscious, goal-aligned choice — like a cricketer deliberately adding a new delivery to their repertoire. When Creating is driven by borrowed excitement (a friend's enthusiasm, a trending skill, a LinkedIn post) rather than your own career plan, you switch the moment novelty fades. The Wheel of Change fails not because the quadrant is wrong, but because the person never anchored the choice to a defined outcome.

    How does the Wheel of Change connect to the Winning Kite framework?

    The Wheel of Change sits on the PQ — Productivity — side of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework), the bottom corner that keeps you grounded while EQ and RQ give you lift. A kite with a strong PQ string but no direction still crashes — which is exactly what happens when Creating isn't tied to a plan.

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