Need advice: career & certs

jk_edu

Happy New year all.

I have worked in the IT field for over 20 years, never did any courses and have learned on the job. Sept 2023, I left my IT management (title only, did everything from 1st - 3rd line support, Vulnerability management, Budgets, cloud networking, Intune MDM, Jamf, etc) role, paying a really good salary, to dedicate all my time to learning Devop tools, fast forward 8 months, having learned a bunch of tools (ansible, terraform, gitops, linux (mostly because it was easier getting tools to run), Docker) I reached out to Tech recruiters, who all came back with the same comment "If you were coming from a s/w dev field, you'd have no issues getting into devops, but your an Ops guy, you haven't a hope", sure that was a kick in the teeth, I took a step back and thought well a lot of these tools would be incredibly useful in Ops, so started looking at 3rd line / inf eng / IT lead roles... Unfortunately, I found more barriers, others going for the same roles with CCNA, RHCSA, AWS SA (and Azure equivalent), and so on.

 

For sure looking for a job to the build-up of xmas, is always terrible, and I’m sure it won’t be the same issue from end of Jan, but over the last month, I have spent researching & planning for 2025 (and beyond) educationally that is.

 

Jan – March: CCNA (via howtonetwork.com), and basic Python development

March – May: AWS SA (via howtonetwork.com)
May – July: PCEP (Certified Entry-level Python Programmer), PCAP (Certified associate in Python Programming) – Both a courses by the python institute, that I’ll be doing via howtonetwork.com, and AWS Foundations in AI

Aug – Nov: either CCNP Enterprise or AWS Machine Learning

 

I realise there’s a lot crammed into the above, but it’s a rough draft.

 

One of my biggest issues has been where do I want to go career wise; I started off as an ICT guy > 1st line support > 2nd line engineer > 3rd line engineer > Lead engineer > Senior field engineer > IT ops Manager

 

Management isn’t a role I want to do again, half my day was spent in meetings (usually arguing why I wouldn’t give devs global admin access to test environments (I mean they had the ability to spin up vms but I had a rule in place the vm would terminate after 12 hours) – before I joined the company they were spending £100k a quarter on VMs the dev forgot to terminate)

 

I love being in the technical trenches, the more complex it is, the happier I am. For a while I have been thinking about aiming my career towards HPC engineering or AI / ML engineering with a specialisation in low latency networking & automation. I’m aware of the Nvidia courses, and thankfully they’re not ridiculously expensive, unlike the Performance & tuning course by RH (which is about $6k pa).

 

So, my questions are, what courses / certs should I be looking at? Or is there an area that I should be focusing on?

 

Regards,

JK

 

 

 

JDMurray

When pivoting to a new career path, certifications are only one factor. Hiring managers are also looking for education and experience. From what you said, your competition for that one DevOps job will likely have better schooling and hands-on practical experience and persuade a hiring manager more than only a collection of certs will.

There are also the additional factors of timing of opportunity, who you know, and luck. Your perfect job posting may have occurred several months ago, or will not be offered for several more months. Even so, there's no guarantee that you will see the best job postings for yourself. Having a network of people that can point you to likely job offers, give you personal recommendations, and even get you a job where they work(ed) greatly speeds up getting a job.

Look at job postings on the top three job sites (LinkedIn, Indeed, and Zip Recruiter) to get an idea of what opportunities are out there and to find out what hiring managers are asking for in basic qualifications, certifications, education, specialty experience (Cloud, database, IoT, etc.), and must-haves for the job (such as foreign language fluency, having an active security clearance, matching the DEI requirements tacitly in-play at that organization, etc.).

Luck is just, well, the likelihood of a favorable random outcome. Both good and bad things happen by chance; luck is always a factor. Sometimes there is just nothing you can do to positively influence a situation and you should just move on to the next opportunity. Sometimes you get a great job almost purely by luck.

If you have picked out a business where you would like to work as a software developer, you should get a job there doing anything they'll hire you for and that you can afford (if only temporarily until you move up). Once you are in the door, you can see what the hiring managers there are looking for in the positions that really interest you and you start building your internal networking contacts. Build yourself to be the perfect candidate to hire for that internal DevOps job you want.

You can start now by making a public portfolio of your software projects on Github. Learn to use all the trendy tools (Docker, Kubernetes, Git Desktop and CL, Jenkins, Ansible, Microsoft Copilot and other AI code-generating tools, etc.) and languages (Python, Rust, Kotlin, Swift, ect.) used by that business. Learn specialized areas of software development that every DevOps shop needs to have, such as creating module unit tests, CI/CD, and performing Software Quality Assurance on AI-generated code. For Cloud, stick with the big three: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform.

Certs are good for learning knowledge and helping you to get first-round interviews, but it's your presentation in the interviews and your verifiable accomplishments that get you hired. Remember: You are being hired to solve the hiring manager's problems. That should be a primary topic of your presentation in every interview.