Network Engineer- Mostly Switching/VPNs

nothimagain

So i recently accepted my first jr network engineer position , but the job seems to mostly entail dealing with Switches/Firewall VPNs and not much routing if any at all.. I wanted to know if im hurting myself career wise by not getting hands routing experience at this job. Im still studying for networking certs , but i want to know if in the future should i avoid these type of environments or is the norm for network engineers to mostly deal with switches?

MitM

Experience is experience.

I deal with mostly firewalls/switching/vpns as well. They are layer 3 switches which do routing. The actual routers in my environment are provider provided, so I have no access to them.

Ertaz

nothimagain wrote: »

So i recently accepted my first jr network engineer position , but the job seems to mostly entail dealing with Switches/Firewall VPNs and not much routing if any at all.. I wanted to know if im hurting myself career wise by not getting hands routing experience at this job. Im still studying for networking certs , but i want to know if in the future should i avoid these type of environments or is the norm for network engineers to mostly deal with switches?

There is no normal. You will eventually need to progress into different tasks, but this is a good opportunity to learn a great deal about L2.

Welly_59

Same as me. The only routing we do is statics in our core. Everything else is ISP provided

Fadakartel

at least your doing IP networking and getting experience.

I did ISP stuff like SDH/DWDM which nobody uses outside of ISP`s so don`t worry about it experience is experience.

nothimagain

Fadakartel wrote: »

at least your doing IP networking and getting experience.

I did ISP stuff like SDH/DWDM which nobody uses outside of ISP`s so don`t worry about it experience is experience.

Thanks for all the feed back guys. I was just scared if i ever left this place i'd have a hard time landing another position because of the lack of Layer 3.

--chris--

I'm mostly L2 and firewalling as well. You will learn L3, just at a slower pace. Even if your wan/mpls is managed you will still need to know what routes need to go where and request these changes from your ISP.


This is good experience, especially the firewall and vpn jobs.

scaredoftests

ANYTHING you have access to and learn from is GREAT. Relish it.

Legacy User

Definitely not hurting yourself. Is layer 3 managed by a higher tier? Or is it outsourced? You are starting off as a junior so Switching/firewalls/vpns is a great place to start. They wouldn't let you work on layer 3 if their smart anyway. If layer 3 is managed by a different tier within your company you can join that team over time or you could work in your place get some good experience get a CCNP RS (legitimately) and start job hunting. Because if you really know routing at a CCNP level you should be able to kill it in interviews.

--chris--

Exactly. L3 + new = bad time (generally). The organization I work for now is smaller and has static L3 internally with managed MPLS (bgp). If I had to handle that walking in on day 1 I would have figured it out...but the stress!