Progress Report
Hey everyone,
Just thought I would give a little update on my career/certs. Basically I applied around and did receive a couple of bites, but sadly nothing in the pay range to skill set ratio that would work for me. It really is rough out there in spite of what people are starting to say. I mean NOTHING that would cover the bills. Not sure how anyone is supposed to make it.
Anyhow, my job is hiring on a few people and I am again doing more administrative tasks. Deployed some new switches, XenApp6 (nightmare) a couple vSphere setups and working on deploying a Nimsoft/CentOS monitoring system right now. In the coming month I’ll be pulling out an old static routed network and moving them to EIGRP and then dropping in some Squid boxes.
I also have a project lined up to reimage a fleet of laptops to 7 Enterprise via WDS.
So, over all pretty excited to be doing real IT work again. It had gotten pretty bad. If I had to fix one more Outlook issue.. ugh.
As far as certifications go, I have officially given up on CCNP. The only people who I know personally who have passed the damn thing in person, have all cheated. Honestly, I refuse to go that route. It’s hard to blame them given the market out there. But for me, rent is paid, food’s on the table and I got my pride in my certs, do they? (probably, and they make more money, ha)
Anyhow, gave up on CCNP I must have spent 400 hours on that thing since 2008 on and off. And it’s just too much to remember. I just don’t use it enough for it to stick for any length of time. 90% of the networking I do is just T1s, static routes, Site to site VPN and basic Firewall.
So I am planning on finish my MCSE: Security. I studied pretty hard for it back about, oh? 1 year ago, but never finished it. I expect ISA Server to be a breeze, but the 70-298 might be a challenge. We’ll see. In either event, I am pretty confident even if I have to take 70-298 twice I should be done by year’s end on my MCSE:Sec.
The next step after that is kind of vague. I partially want to snag some virtualization certs, Microsoft and Xen. (I can’t afford VCP) But then again, I think it might be better to drive my effort into something like SQL. Make myself more valuable on the business side?
One last thing I was thinking, CCNA:Wireless. Looks like I can rent lab time cheap, so that isn’t a problem. What sounds like is it’s mainly raw trivia, anyone confirm this? For some reason I just wana “collect them all” at the associates level
Thoughts? Input? Flames?
