Not sure what to do next

Hello Everyone,

I recently passed my CCNP and was offered full time work at my current place of contract with a substantial increase. (YAY!). It, however, doesn't have as much hands on as I would like and in time would like to find something closer to home but want to make sure I have the skills to justify this pay from here on out.

So my question to you all is what would be good for a network engineer to learn as other skills to benefit me?
VMWare VCP? Linux? I am not ready to do my CCIE yet.

Any suggestions are welcome.

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Comments

W Stewart

I'm going to say linux but I'm sure my avatar makes my biased obvious. Most network engineer job postings I've seen just seem to cover a lot of networking like ospf voip and things like that but when they do venture out of the realm of pure networking, they seem to request linux experience.

ccnpninja

Vmware and Linux? definitely yes. Actually, Cisco put a videosurveillance product that includes both Vmware and Red Hat.

ande0255

I started on my VCP even before CCNP as I have seen a major push in cloud based solutions, so getting a jump on virtualization, and especially virtual networking has a growing demand at the moment, though I'm sure linux has it's own niche in the networking world as well.

Getting a jump start on virtualization right now though seems like a really good investment of time, as most most datacenters incorporate some form of virtualization, if not the majority of the datacenter.

kohr-ah

Thanks everyone

I think I will definitely start my VCP and do Linux at home here shortly after I finish up CCNA+ARCH (Have to for work) and see where it can take me down the road.
I still want to make it where I can do networking most the time but make me of more value to a company.