At a crossroads

Shockwave29361

I'm at a crossroads as to what I should do within the next year. A little background info: I'm currently living in Japan and working for an American contracting company that deals with network/systems/etc. contracts for the military bases out here. I started out as a cable TV/Internet installer while working on my AAS in System Administration, at the same time I was studying for my CCNA which I failed twice so I set it aside until I completed my degree before devoting more time towards it. Once I finished my degree I was offered to take on a Symantec/Altiris contract. Only catch was that I would have to know the products inside and out before being promoted to this position. I completed the contract and a few more afterwards and have since been the "Symantec Expert" of the company in which I handle anything related to it. I'm also a certified Prometric and Pearson VUE test proctor for our mobile test center.

I have less than a year left before I have to move back to the states and I'm concerned that I won't be specialized enough to fit in a certain roll. I don't have any certifications and all of my experience can basically be summarized as a 20 mile-wide lake with 2 feet of depth. I touch on almost every aspect of IT but not so much that I can specialize into anything. I've thought about sticking with the Symantec path but even with that most companies are looking for people well beyond my skill level. I'm worried that I'll end up in a help desk when I get back to the states. I'm not so prideful that I'll scoff at the idea but sometimes with my co-workers, I feel like I'm working a help desk:

Co-worker: "This laptop doesn't turn on."
Me: "Is it charged? Plug it in and turn it on."
CW: ".... Hey it worked!"

Guess what I'm looking for is ideas on what I should look for given my experience. The crossroads I'm at is sys admin, Symantec, or security. Even though I do networking, I can't stare at switch and router command lines all day.

erpadmin

For you, you need to find a small shop that will give you a jack-of-all-trades (JOAT) job. If you're a Symantec expert, no doubt you know Veritas Backup, Ghost, etc. You can leverage your experience to say you can create a proper image and push it out over the network. While at the same time, you'd take calls, perform desktop support, and maintain the infrastructure. You won't be specializing in a shop like that BUT you will find something in that shop that you want to specialize in. In my case, it was SQL. For you, you might want Cisco. But the small shop is what you're looking for.