Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Failure at the interview, career advice for next step

I work at one of the bigges telecom company as a Network Security Engineer. My main role is to maintain and update every single ACL in the whole company. It is about 100+ ACL for 100million user. Plus I do policy creations and updates in F5 Big-IQ and Juniper Space. And a little bit of VPN support. Mostly creating new VPN profiles(IKE1-2) in fortigate. I got CCNA, CCNA Sec, JNCIA, Linux+ project+, about to get Redhat admin. I want to get out of here to get a SDN or devop type of job. But looks like easier way out is Cisco or F5.

My previous role was similar except it was in Infrastructure security and all I was doing was completing MOPs by copy/paste. Now at least I am creating those for ACL and sometimes for routing updates for VPNs.

So I just had an interview for a Sr. Network Engineering Architect job. I was good with all BGP, OSPF and VPN questions. But, my weaknesses was scripting and SDN experience. I know SDN fundamentals, but didnt really get any expierence or hands on. And there are so much shit out there when it comes to SDN.

So enough of background. I am planning to get some more certs or just study on my weaknesses.

Path 1- Study CCNA-DC & CCNP and maybe squeeze CCNP-Arch since CCNP covers first 2 examp of this.

Path 2- Study Devops stuff Openstack, Ansible, Dockers jenkinsv and python/shell scripting etc...

Path 3- Go F5 load balancing & FW path. Get F5 101, 201, 301,302,303,304 certs(CCNP equivalent of F5). I can knock out 101 and 102 in 1-2 months all together, but others will take time.

Probably each path will take about 10-14 months to study and complete. I could do may be a little faster, but I got 6 years old kid and 8 months old baby.

What would get me a Sr level network/devops engineer job and bring at least $100K a year?



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