What I Learnt from My 3-Month Sabbatical: Creating Beats Credentialing

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” — Richard Feynman

Ten years into my working life in February 2025, I took a three-month sabbatical from my job as a solution engineer at Microsoft. Not because I was burnt out, or chasing some audacious life goal. To be honest, it was my girlfriend’s idea. But it turned out to be a fantastic one. As we traveled through Africa and Asia, I followed a hunch: that the next phase of my career wouldn’t be shaped by what I know, but by what I build.

For most of my twenties, credentials opened doors. Good academic performance in my first law degree earned me a scholarship to pursue a law and technology master’s in the Netherlands. That degree led to a working visa, which led to a job at Philips, and eventually to a consulting role at Deloitte. That job helped me secure citizenship in the Netherlands—one of the world’s strongest economies and trading nations.

That passport has since allowed me to travel freely to several countries, including the U.S.—a far cry from my days as a Zimbabwean citizen, enduring expensive months-long visa interviews and processes just to prove I wasn’t a terrorist or an aspiring illegal migrant.

Credential signalling worked. It had to. I come from a background of African immigrants where signalling is survival. At my dad’s 60th birthday in March 2025, with family members chattering around the living room, I remember a comment from my grandmother that struck me. She said, “The one thing I want to see before I die is one of my grandchildren earning a PhD.”

That moment hit me—not because it was surprising, but because it was so familiar. This was despite me - the oldest grandchild - having a master’s degree and working at Microsoft. One of her other grandchildren has a master’s from SOAS—the UK’s elite statesman factory. Another is studying design at MIT. Another is at Duke, pursuing an MBA after earning a biomedical engineering degree from Stanford.

In my family, the pursuit of pedigree is a kind of quiet obsession—an endless race with no finish line. But I’m at a different juncture now. I no longer need to ask for validation. For the first time, my startup-in-a-garage kind of visions are my most important aspirations.

And that means one thing: it’s time to break free from the signalling mindset.

Beyond sorting people into the workforce, credentials are essentially outdated forecasts—trying to predict which skills match which jobs. But your past performance on tests won’t help you figure out what’s actually worth doing in the real world. And it definitely won’t make you better at doing it.

The most valuable things I’ve learned in the past few years didn’t come from a classroom or a course. They came from building. From applying existing tools in new and useful ways to solve real problems.

Like leveraging data governance theory to help build robust security architectures for major banks like Rabobank and ING.

Or from pulling together roundtables that felt more like underground communities than Microsoft events. From observing what makes people share what they know—and what keeps them quiet.

Of course, many security topics are confidential. But there’s a wealth of knowledge and tooling in this field that can push entire industries forward—without ever compromising sensitive information.

No certification taught me any of that. Before my sabbatical, I failed the Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional exam—a credential I pursued out of habit more than necessity. I’ve done a lot of work with multinationals on securing their generative AI chat assistants, so why not add another notch to the certification belt?

But I hated it. Not because it was hard, but because the learning felt lifeless—more about memorising definitions than grappling with ideas. Compare. Recall. Regurgitate. The exact mindset I’ve been unlearning for five years.

Meanwhile, the work that energises me—the work that actually makes a difference—is almost always creative. Designing security reporting models. Building technical deployment roadmaps. Performing live demos. Writing blogs, making videos, and giving talks that make technical standards practical—something real people can use to get their jobs done, or make the world a little safer, or a little more fun.

That’s the work I want more of.

That’s the work that scales.

And so I’ve started making a shift. I no longer ask, “What do I need to learn?” I ask, “What do I need to create?” If the answer is compelling enough for me to commit to building something, I’ll do the work—remembering, analysing, evaluating—because now I have skin in the game. And that makes the learning stick.

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, said he dropped out of college just before his final semester because he realised all the insights he needed to create a great virtual reality headset were attainable online —and someone was going to act on them. Probably Sony. He just decided it should be him. That urgency mattered more than intellectual validation.

That’s how I want to operate now: urgent, applied, exponential.

That’s also why I’ve shifted from a deal-by-deal technical focus to a broader approach: content and community-building that supports not just this year’s security product sales at Microsoft, but several years’ worth of cyber resilience in our digital future. The technical work in my day job is measured in deal impact—priority one—but it needs to live beyond the financial cycle.

Looking at my impact at Microsoft over the last 4 years, outside of mandatory training, none of my customers or colleagues in the field asked me to get a new cert. They asked me to provide them more often with the spaces I create through roundtables, and the content I create through blogging, talks, and media.

The world doesn’t need more credentialed experts. It needs more creative implementers. Curious tinkerers. People with spiky skillsets—deep in one or two areas, but grounded enough to stay connected to real problems. People who know the best tools aren’t missing—they’re sitting on shelves or waiting to be used to build a better, more secure world.

This sabbatical turned out be a good bet—not just on rest and reflection, but on alignment. On building more. Writing more. Sharing more. Creating spaces for others to come together. On being more useful in public.

At 35 years old, I no longer need to prove I’m smart.

Sorry Grandma—I love you, but the PhD can wait.

I’m going to enjoy my working life by being more useful, and less driven by credentials and titles.

And the only way to do that… is to create.