Monday, June 15, 2020

How/where to take the next step in our industry? And when do you know it's time to quit and move on?

Hey guys I need some advice.. I think this is appropriate here since I'm midway into my Networking career. Plus, I really do need input from people in our field.

So in my current role, I am in a NOC for a large enterprise. I love what the company does outside of networking and find it really interesting. I also get to touch a lot of different technologies from Cisco (Enterprise, Data Center, Service Provider, and Automation), However, I don't really have the opportunity to deep dive into any of these topics and am restricted to really just finishing as many smaller tasks as possible. Most of my days are spent monitoring, working with ISPs on circuit issues, and working on environmental issues at different sites. Additionally, the hours are a killer on my home life. Aggressive swing schedule that alternates back to night shift almost every other month and more than half the weekends of the year plus many holidays. I've been frustrated and wanting to leave for quite some time, but what has really pushed me to consider leaving is that we've been told no one will be converted to a full employee (oh yeah, I'm also contracted with no PTO, 401k, etc) for at least another additional year because of COVID.....

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So I've been aggressively studying my CCNP and I'm about 3 weeks out from taking ENCOR and then on to ENARSI and I've been doing some interviews with other companies that seem reasonable...

1st is a small IT team for a large(ish) healthcare company in my area. 30 IT employees, but 3,000 total employees and 20 remote branches. This would be 100% enterprise networking and security with lots of site-to-site VPN work as well and maybe a little bit of data center. This seems like a good opportunity, but I'm sort of bummed about not getting to touch an even larger enterprise and have that additional exposure.

2nd is for an MSP/ISP that is also a massive enterprise similar to my job now. But this role I'd be an engineer only specializing in Data networks. This would be a LOT of MPLS and BGP and maybe some data center but no enterprise aspect.

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So what do you guys think? Stick it out and suck it up while I study my CCNP and turn these opportunities down? Or do I grab one if they pre-emptively offer me CCNP level pay (I make roughly 65ish now and I'm starting my asking at around 72ish). I like these other offers but I'm afraid of the unknown in our field and don't want to move somewhere and get complacent with my skills. I really love this stuff and study hard almost every day.

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tl;dr

When do you know it's time to move on in our field? And to where?



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