Question for Voice Engineers in the field

techiie · October 2015

I was approached by a recruiter for an ongoing contract role as a Voice Admin at a huge school something around 50k endpoints. It is basically Admin to CUCM,CUC, Avaya, Polycom (add/remove/call handlers/bat/cti) Basic Admin role. The pay is really generous. My concern is I work more so on a "engineer side". I set up WLC, ASA(vpn, acl, etc), CUCM (50 users), CUC(aa voicemail), CUBE, SIP TRUNKS, Routers (IGP), Switches all in several small businesses up to 75 users. I work more so on the voice side since thats the first thing people realize that they having a problem with. I would like to venture off into the voice side since I feel I have a firm grasp on it. I see this role as possibly taking a step back but on the other side it could give me experience working on a huge environment.

Only reason I'm considering this position because I will have CUCM and exposure to everything else (on the admin side) on a day to day basis in a much larger environment. My concern is I know how these recruiters are already if I take this role and hang out for a year or whatever and try to transition in an Voice engineer role I may run into an wall. I know they'll say, "I see you work more on the Admin side, but we are looking for someone who works with voice gateways/cube mgcp, h323, sip and all of that stuff plus the call routing in cucm.

Any insight to see if this position is a good move?

negru_tudor · October 2015

Well I see you've worked on mainly SMB size environments. Stepping into a 50K+ seat environment would give you exposure to a lot of things you might not bump into on the smaller environments (solution scaling challenges, QoS, regular exposure to the tech etc). On the flip side, you might find out you're doing routine work sometime down the road once you get more accustomed to the tech that's deployed there..still, it pretty much depends 'cause if the new lot is keen on keeping up with technology and have remote branches / offices you might actually have a lot of exposure to CUBE/GWs, MGCP and a lot of SIP if they go for SIP trunks (which pretty much everybody seems to do nowadays)..you could just go for it to get a taste of how it feels and when you feel you've learned all you could, start looking for something else..at the end of the day, if you have the skills you're the one dictating what you can / can't do, not a recruiter making assumptions based on what they think you *might* know..

pitviper · October 2015

Once you get into massive environments it's a real eye opener - you likely know much less than you think. If you're into voice, it sounds like an excellent opportunity to expand your skills. Like negru said, you don't have to stay forever.

devilsadvocate · October 2015

I went from a CUCM only environment with 20 users to a CUCM/CUC/UCCX/CUPS setup with 150 users.

The learning curve has been huge for me!
In a good way though as I like to be thrown in at the deep end.

Question for Voice Engineers in the field

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