Network Engineer Jobs - The (seemingly) lucrative contract work

1Cisco1

I was wondering if there were any professionals out there who had experience doing Cisco contract work/network engineer contract work. I (like many others, I am sure) would love to travel a bit through the course of my career. I was hoping someone could shed some light on this subject. I am young, single, I have a 4-year degree, I have only 2 years of experience under my belt, and do not yet have my CCNP. Some questions I have are:

1. How experienced or advanced in your career do you have to be to land CCNP+ level contracts?
2. Do you generally need a CCIE and the decades of experience that comes with it to land a decent job abroad?
3. Does anyone out there have experience working in Singapore, Australia, the UK, or Germany? (I am an American) How is the job market there? How advanced did your language skills need to be? Did colleges speak business English?
4. To land a contract abroad, do you generally need to move to a new location first, or will employers actually hire an individual after having only done Skype interviews/internet correspondence?
5. Any advice, personal experiences, or lessons learned from contract work would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to contribute to this thread.

shodown

1. How experienced or advanced in your career do you have to be to land CCNP+ level contracts?

Depends on what needs to be done. If its a large roll out you can get by on less expeince as they may need people to pump out configs and implement sites

2. Do you generally need a CCIE and the decades of experience that comes with it to land a decent job abroad?

No

3. Does anyone out there have experience working in Singapore, Australia, the UK, or Germany? (I am an American) How is the job market there? How advanced did your language skills need to be? Did colleges speak business English?

N/A

4. To land a contract abroad, do you generally need to move to a new location first, or will employers actually hire an individual after having only done Skype interviews/internet correspondence?

N/A
5. Any advice, personal experiences, or lessons learned from contract work would be very much appreciated.

Get your corp set up now for the state you live in. Get a company name and go see an accountant. There are various types of corps, but a lot of places don't take 1099 all the time, but they do corp to corp. Inject some of your own cash into the corp and buy study material and other work related items with it. When the opportunity does come you will be able to say you already have your own corp.

2. Working as a successful contractor requires investment into yourself as you are a business. So spending that 5K on lab gear, training is an investment into your business and it does pay off.

3. Get the right jobs now. I've met a lot of 10-20 year industry people who have no real true skills. They parked themselves at jobs that may have paid good, but didn't require any real skills. Cisco partners are the best place to pick up these skills. I've worked for quite a few and you always do more than most people in the enterprise.