Looking for career advice on next move to become a network admin/engineer

ps.89 · June 2020

Hi all,

I'm looking for career advice on what next steps I can take to move my career to the next level. My goal is to become a network admin or engineer. I'm following the usual path from help desk, then to "NOC", but I'm having trouble moving into Networking. I have a Bachelor's degree in Networking and I recently earned my CCNA.

I've been working in my current position for about two years now. I'm part of an Operations Center that has dual responsibilities in Incident Management and Network Operations, but to my dislike, we're more much more focused in Incident Management. For the little Network Ops work that I do, my duties consist of monitoring the environment and responding to alerts by following runbooks, reaching out to carriers for circuit issues, and basic information gathering on network issues before escalating to the network engineers (which sometimes can consist of logging into network devices to run show commands). However, I'm afraid that this experience is not enough to get me a true Networking job, even with my credentials.

Ideally, I'd want to move up into our company's network department, but I'm not sure how to achieve this. I'm pretty close to one of our Network engineers and was shadowing him for a little bit, but it's been put on pause ever since covid-19. I was hoping to train with him and maybe position myself as a candidate for when their department hires, but I haven't seen any new Network engineer postings on our company's internal website.

Any advice you can give me? Based on the limited job description I gave, could I qualify for a network admin or engineer job? What are some techniques I can use to put myself in front of the Network department manager to show him I'm interested in working for him? How can I show that I'm worthy of hiring, even with the limited networking experience?

Thanks

JDMurray · June 2020

Is your company large enough to have a career development/advancement program? If not, I would start talking with the hiring managers in the department(s) you would like to move to.

ps.89 · June 2020

JDMurray said:

Is your company large enough to have a career development/advancement program? If not, I would start talking with the hiring managers in the department(s) you would like to move to.

My company is pretty large but I don't know if we have any programs like that. Is that a question for HR or my manager? I've spoken to my manager about my ambitions and he's been very supportive. However, like you stated, I think I need to put myself in front of the hiring manager for our Network department. Any ideas on how to approach this?

ps.89 · June 2020

ps.89 said:

JDMurray said:

Is your company large enough to have a career development/advancement program? If not, I would start talking with the hiring managers in the department(s) you would like to move to.

My company is pretty large but I don't know if we have any programs like that. Is that a question for HR or my manager? I've spoken to my manager about my ambitions and he's been very supportive. However, like you stated, I think I need to put myself in front of the hiring manager for our Network department. Any ideas on how to approach this?

So after browsing my company website, I found an entire section dedicated to Career Development. There's even a PDF for a "Career Development Plan Employee Guide", which outlines a four-step Career Development Process. Step 1 of the process discusses preparing for the initial career conversation with my manager. I'm still reviewing all the documents, but my initial thought is, "How can I appropriately bring this conversation up with my manager?" He's fairly new to the company so I doubt he's even aware that this exists.

Looking for career advice on next move to become a network admin/engineer

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