Feeling Directionless Career-Wise

Hi all,

Duplicate post of the ITCareers sub, but I wanted to get some advice here too.

I don’t know that there’s any specific point to this, but I wanted to just free-form write some of my thoughts because commenters here usually have good advise and I need a sounding board.

I’m a netadmin, five years of good experience with a nice set of certs. Most of what I do is route/switch have some experience in voice and wireless, and a little bit in firewall.

I feel burnt out on the operations side due to the usual off-hours stuff as well as user network-blaming. I’m also bored. There’s nowhere to advance to at my company. I’m the only networking person. Most of my job feels like I’m just babysitting a bunch of switches and APs.

The market for security is big but I feel like that sector is a lot of telling people what they should be doing and them not listening, and I knowni I’m not built for that.

I’m kind of interested in wireless. I like the technology and designing in Ekahau. The downside is I don’t feel like the market for wireless engineers is almost nonexistent.

I like designing in general and rolling out new technology. Most of those roles want presale experience and of course how do you get experience when experience is required?

I don’t understand what role there is for Network Engineers in the cloud. I see AWS/Azure on a ton of job postings. It seems expensive to lab and the concepts seem ambiguous to me.

I’ve learned the devops/automation/Python basics. Is that the real futureproofed path for people on the network side?

I’ll hang up and listen to your comments.