How would you define an 'ideal' career path for a Network Engineer or Admin ?

anuragaks10

Hey folks,

I am browsing the job market and I can only speculate so much about the nature of the jobs offered on jobsites. I have come across different stories of career paths taken by people although my goal is to be a Network Engineer. I'd even settle for a Network Admin position at big enterprise level. Some people start off as NOC engineers, some as Helpdesk technicians, some in Support centers and it just seems that this field of IT has very fuzzy boundaries. Hence, just like the title said :

How would you describe an "ideal" career path for a starter to become a Network Engineer (designer/Infosec/Admin/ISP-related) ? What roles would be beneficial and which jobs would hamper or slow down the progress ? etc.

Please share your experience, insights and wisdom as I feel like I've come at an impasse with myself concerning my (upcoming?) career. Would highly appreciate it.

Regards

gespenstern

I would look for exactly junior network positions. The thing is, help desk and operations center fields won't give you much experience that you can use as a network engineer. You will have zero exposure to cisco routers and ios command line interface. These fields are sort of okay to be in if you are looking to be a windows engineer or security guy, but network i don't think so.

I would suggest to work there only if you have to (i.e. have to generate some income to stay afloat) while hardly working to get cisco and/or juniper certs and intern or junior positions in networking

Kuroki

Although it doesn't directly answer the question..

But anyway, with me I'm still young and fresh and I'm currently on the first year of my BSc (Hons) Network & Security, regrettably taken the academic route, I've already got a mini soup can of certifications, I'm just progressing my degree with a Cisco focus, and from any of the modules if possible take a certification related to it, throughout the degree I want to have (Alongside my current ones) MCP/MCSA, and VCA-NV, and perhaps CCNP if I can crack it (I don't have much of a social life outside uni). At this point you're probably going to see me as a paper boy, and I sometimes do, but I'm actively trying to avoid this by going above and beyond (Already made recommendations to my uni about using clientless SSL for remote file access).

After the degree I want to try and test my luck with getting a Jr role in Network Engineering, if I can't then I'll be applying for MSc with Industrial Year which'll give me some experience!

I'm not the right guy for advice either, obviously, but if you can go above and beyond the network qualifications that you're doing, get some cabling, get some connectors, make cables, hell even install some cheap ugly patch panels if you need, just do something outside that shows your passion? Or even get an evaluation version for Windows Server and practice administrating a small network inside of VMWare/VirtualBox? In my opinion, gives you something to talk about on your profile section on your CV and in the interview

EDIT: As stated by the above poster, get a Jr role, and if you can afford it get some exposure to some equipment, preferably brand new so you get some experience in deploying IOS images over TFTP, and troubleshooting the crud load of errors you get, well I did anyway, even break-fix some equipment

kurosaki00

I would say CCNA is your go to cert.

I went tech support --> Network Admin --> System admin --> NOC Tech (mostly Tier1) and I'm struggling getting to that other level.
But I think finding a good NOC (one that lets you troubleshoot devices) would be very beneficial. Just study and keep at it. Look at positions in your area, see whats on demand and prepare yourself.

docrice

As someone who has "Network Security Engineer" in his title, I think a good network engineer/admin has a solid understanding of all moving parts - user behavior, client application, client device, network transition, target server, target app, data extraction. While starting at helpdesk and desktop support provides the user-experience perspective, it's typically a longer climb to get into a networking role because it's easy to become pigeon-holed into systems-management.

If you start in a NOC, you get more direct exposure to network-centric things but you miss out on how you impact the nodes and perception of users and applications. In general, I'd probably recommend starting out doing a networking role that also provides exposure to the desktop and server side of the house as well. Being a jack-of-all-trades at smaller businesses isn't bad either, assuming you're actually going to handle networking tasks (not just superficially).

Network+ and the CCNA is a good start, but you should learn about the OSI stack and the data/header encapsulation/decapsulation process early on. Like subnetting, it feels like an abstract idea at first and difficult to grasp, but once you get it so many things start falling into place and you become much more effective because everything builds on top of it. One of my regrets is not learning this early in my career as it inherently limited how I perceived the order of operations of all the virtual interacting gears when troubleshooting issues.

There are too many network engineers who understand how to configure networking devices but fundamentally don't understand networking protocols and their behavior (and how they're abused). I've interviewed job candidates for network engineer positions who could obviously configure things in a demonstration lab, but when it came to looking at traffic anomalies they were a bit lost because they couldn't "see" how the frames and packets were created, forwarded, manipulated, and interpreted by networking equipment. As devices become more sophisticated in inspection logic, it becomes even more critical to really understand what's happening underneath the cover.

Jon_Cisco

I think you have to start somewhere and any help desk might be that starting point. However if you have specific goals then you want to start to be picky about your jobs. Whenever possible a job change should always move you in the direction you want to go.

If you not working in networking try to at least be working in companies that deal with it. You need to find paths that push you in the direction you want to go. A big part of this is being good at the job your doing while preparing for the job you want. If you spend a year in a job that does not help you nobody will notice. But if you spend 10 years on help desk people will want to know why.