What's a more creative career being an Exchange Admin or an CCNP?

The Doctor

Hi all, I am new to the forums and I need some advice about what I should do next in career. I've been doing general IT work for about last 10 years. Most doing a combo of help desk and server admin. I sick of being a generalist and I want to be something more specific. At my current position I mostly just answer help desk tickets and it's so mind numbing. I need a career that forces me to creative and innovative.

I am looking into doing either Exchange 2010 or Cisco (CCNP to be exact). So my question is which one will force me to the most creative and innovative?

networker050184

I don't think there is a clear cut answer to that question. I think it would more come down to the role you are in. Someone has to get creative and design both aspects of the infrastructure.

Everyone

I'd say Exchange, but I'm biased. :P The only problem now is Exchange will limit where you can work. A lot of companies have jumped on the "cloud" bandwagon, and e-mail is one of the 1st things they throw out there. No on premises Exchange means no need for an Exchange Admin. So now you either have to work for a service provider, or work at a place that doesn't trust their e-mail system to someone else and keeps it in-house. You'll also find that you'll be doing a lot more than Exchange work at most places. I do Exchange, all of our AD, DNS, DHCP, and more. This is at a company with more than 400 servers in our datacenter, and over 3000 employees.

While Cisco is big, you probably want to lean more towards "Network Engineer", and not limit yourself to Cisco. For example, the place I work at switched from Cisco to Foundry (now Brocade). This type of work will always be needed everywhere, it's not something that can be sent "to the cloud" or outsourced.

Mishra

It depends on the job, not the certification. But I get what you are saying...

I would say being a pure Exchange Admin at a company will not be that creative. The infrastructure is setup so you just manage it.

Being an Exchange Admin as a consultant is a large amount of creativity. You will be doing many multiple installs. Much more demanding of a career as well. Could pay more.

Being a 'network professional' at a big company will be a back and forth. You may setup new location if they are growing. But if it is a decommission/maintain kind of infrastructure then it will all depend on the company.

A network professional consultant is again, a large amount of creativity.

This is NOT an end all answer. This answer will always vary depending on the individual/business.

instant000

The Doctor wrote: »

Hi all, I am new to the forums and I need some advice about what I should do next in career. I've been doing general IT work for about last 10 years. Most doing a combo of help desk and server admin. I sick of being a generalist and I want to be something more specific. At my current position I mostly just answer help desk tickets and it's so mind numbing. I need a career that forces me to creative and innovative.

I am looking into doing either Exchange 2010 or Cisco (CCNP to be exact). So my question is which one will force me to the most creative and innovative?

Whether or not a role is creative kinda depends on the role.

Whether you're a Messaging guru, or Network guru, if you're in a structured environment, being "creative" or "innovative" can get you in trouble!

Now, if you're in more of a permissive environment, yes, you can be more "creative" and "innovative".

Now, one thing that will become apparent, as you get further along in your "guru" status, is that you will find that you tend to gravitate towards "best practice" for things. Remember that you want to have a standardized approach to things, as you want to ease troubleshooting.

It is great to be creative and innovative if it can make things better overall (saving business money is always welcome, for example.)

I hope this makes sense.

Currently, I'm an Exchange Admin, for example, and in my current role, if I try to be too creative or innovative, it can lead to problems, LOL. I want a stable environment (and so does the customer!), so I can sleep at night. So, give me all the best practices you can, LOL.

EDIT1: Also, it kind of goes without saying, being an Exchange Admin, you need knowledge of networking, storage, security, messaging, and servers. Being a generalist could only help you here.

EDIT2: In addition, I can see your generalist background being a great background information for networking, as you have a strong appreciation of the end systems that will be connecting to the intermediate systems that you'll be administering.

tbgree00

In my opinion you really don't want creativity in an infrastructure admin role. I have to get very creative sometimes to troubleshoot and fix a desktop issue. If you're a specialized admin and have helper monkeys (like me) dealing with trouble tickets you don't want to have a lot of slapped together fixes for problems, it's harder to document everything and means more work later on.

If you want to be creative and make your own infrastructure then consultant works is your calling. It's long hours and a lot of pressure (every day is essentially a big project day) but you'll find a lot of troubleshooting issues too.

My best suggestion is to enroll in a community college art course or pick up a "teach yourself basketweaving" book at the library to express your creativity. I've started reteaching myself to draw and once I get a little free time I'll probably do a class at a community college. It's a nice release actually and the course would mean sweet student discounts!