Network Engineer at a Gold Partner???

pujan96

Hi All,

Was wondering if anyone could share what its like working as a network engineer at a Gold partner?

Once I have my CCIE (long way away but the goal is there), I was hoping to get in at a gold partner here in the UK, could anyone share there experiences? Obviously I understand it will be different dependent on the company however I want to know what makes it different compared to other financial/public sector environments working as a network engineer.

Also what are the benefits? lol

Thanks

ccie14023

Yes, very dependent on the company. I was a network engineer at a Gold partner in the US for 2 years. I did both pre- and post-sales roles. The good news is, if you have your CCIE, you can often be treated quite well at a partner, because they need CCIEs. They also paid for my second CCIE which was nice since I paid for my first myself.

In a post-sales role, you'll be doing deployments. The partner will sell some equipment and attach a Statement of Work (SoW) which spells out the cost to install it. Then you go on site and do the installation. Depending on the partner, you could be doing pre-staging work and then the gear gets shipped out or staging it on site. You could even be doing physical rack and stack. Pros: A lot of hands-on work; great experience; interesting exposure to a variety of customers. Cons: Often long hours on site; maintenance windows at weird times; a lot of travel.

Pre-sales work involves meeting with the customer, figuring out their needs, spec'ing out their equipment requirements and Bill of Materials, and writing up Statements of Work. Often you help the post-sales engineers do the install since you designed the network. Pros: Usually better hours; more lucrative since you usually are compensated on commission; satisfaction of doing design work. Cons: Compensation can be highly dependent on quality of sales people; less hands-on experience.

There are other jobs at partners like NOC engineers as well.

In my own case, I enjoyed my first year because we were building a Cisco practice and were wining and dining Cisco channel account managers and had some large scale deployments. However, the partner fell on hard times and in the second year I was driving to small customers in the middle of nowhere doing single-switch deployments and other nonsense until I finally got laid off.

Overall I think a partner is a good place to get experience and if it's a good partner, build a long-term career. There are opportunities to move up, from post-sales to pre-sales, from engineer to manager or director, etc.