Where to go from here....
I’ve been in the IT industry for about 5 years now. Starting out as desktop support I became a jack of all trades; learning servers, storage, exchange, desktops, phones, networking. You name it I’ve supported it in some form or fashion. Over the years I found that even though I enjoyed most of these things, but I need to determine a more specific path. Networking is what gave me the most satisfaction. I think it was the ability to understand the 1’s and 0’s and how all that came together with a few commands that really held my interest.
Now that I hold the position of a Network Engineer I feel like I am at another crossroads. I’ve gained most my networking skills on Cisco equipment; but of course I understand enough to be able to work through other vendors. Yes there are plenty of vendor technologies out there but more my concern is where does the next technology take me and which train should I ride. Software Defined Networking is definitely the way of the future, and a lot of companies have already transitioned over; whether it’s in-house or through a third party. My current place of employment was in the process of moving over to this technology when some decision were made and we are considering other options. With these other options cloud networking was presented as a direction we may be taking. Through all this back and forth I have begun to look into the different technologies available; and see where I might improve my skills. Trying to study up on things take time, and not having a clear cut direction I try not to waste too much time looking into something if I don’t see it in my future.
At one point I began to hear that programming is where networking is going…You need to know how to program to stay up with the direction networking is going. “Automation, APIs through programming”…Things like that. I began to do some research and landed knee deep into python. I’ve watched hours of videos; little labs; some testing. This all looked pretty awesome but I also came to two big conclusions:
My current environment wouldn’t really benefit from anything that programming has to offer. We don’t have thousands of devices that need same configuration dumped onto. There’s nothing that needs to be automated
All that I’m learning to attempt in programming applications like Solarwinds can already handle for me. There may be some reports I can program to pull information but Solarwinds does most of this stuff really well already. They already allow you to interject configuration into devices on your network. With services like this at your disposal I need some more convincing to want to go down that rabbit whole.
Going back to old fashion networking there are plenty of specializations you can find yourself going into. I myself currently support LAN/WAN and WLAN; mostly on Cisco equipment but we do have some other vendors mixed in there. That being said you have security, cloud, Data Center, wireless, service provider, etc. There are so many concentrations out there along with vendors it can be hard to keep up and decide what direction you really want to go. I myself really enjoy routing and switching and plan to increase my skills at that. But I also want to be up on the latest technologies out there. I plan to continue to dabble into programming/DevOps, and really start to dig into cloud networking. I believe these two concentration will allow me to stay relevant in an ever changing industry where you do not what to get left behind. What’s your direction? Is there a must technology out there you think will benefit those in the IT industry?