Long story short; I'm bored of my job and no longer enjoy working where I work, so I'm looking around. I'd like to get into a networking administration role (I do support at the moment and tbh, I've totally had it for many reasons) and while I know plenty about the core concepts of networking (I can quite happily sit and explain the difference between routing, switching and bridging, etc) I'm struggling to get any interviews for these type of roles which I can only put down to the fact I don't currently have any formal experience in this area to back my knowledge up. I've been mostly applying for roles in universities which is what I'm currently doing now so I don't see the lack of interviews being down to the environments I'm applying to as I'm plenty experienced in the education sector overall.

So I've come to the conclusion that I should get some kind of certification in order to back up the fact that I do know a fair bit about this stuff, and obviously the CCNA is the lowest one really worth getting (they do a new CCENT now but I'd like to aim higher than "entry-level"). I'm thinking about booking it for the end of this month in order to really give myself some incentive to hammer through it, but I don't know whether that schedule's too aggressive to be realistic and I'd be just wasting my money, so for any of you who've passed it, roughly how long did you spend preparing for it?

There are a lot of network techs looking for work, because its what everyone wants to do. CCNA is what everyone seems to be doing, so if you want to increase your chances you'll need to aim a lot higher.

What are you enterprise design skills like? For instance, implementing a UK wide network, etc?

vlans, vdi, virtualisation, SANs, etc.

I suspect that while qualifications might help, some real recent practical experience would be the key.

Yep, that's exactly the problem, I don't actually have any of that experience and I'm not going to get it here. On our campus, everything to do with networking is run centrally now, from a team which hasn't had a public job opening for several years (I've been keeping an eye open for ages, knowing that's something I'd prefer to do over support). I wouldn't look to be working on something UK-wide at this stage anyway, the roles I'm going for at other unis are basically the sort of role I can't get into here (i.e. part of a team who maintain a network for a single campus). Plus, out of the four things you listed there, only one are done by our networks team anyway so even if I could get into there, I would only get any experience of VLANs. Our VDI, virtualisation and SANs have been put in by external consultants and day-to-day are supported and maintained by our Systems team with consultancy help. My ex-boss is currently trying to get me some kind of secondment into our Networks team but so far he's not getting anywhere so that's another avenue which currently looks to be closed off.

So I'm back to in theory being able to explain how a campus-wide network should probably be implemented, but not having the experience of having done it. The problem I have with going any higher is that the next step up is the CCNP which would require a large investment in kit (with money I don't currently have) and I honestly think that's overkill for the sort of role I'm looking for. For example, a mate of mine is CCNP-qualified and has spent the last 4 years at Virgin Media working in their business networking division somewhere winning multi-million pound network contracts and new business all the time, which is a role totally on another scale from what I'd be looking at maintaining an existing network for a single organisation. It's really hard to justify to myself getting into some possibly quite serious debt to buy equipment to study for a qualification that might not make any difference to the roles I'm applying for.

Useful advice though, has at least given me something to think about, ta

Is your job currently fairly safe (even if boring)? If so I would be tempted to suggest you stick where you are, and press for the secondment, saying you feel it would help improve your helpdesk role if you had more background knowledge to how things work.

We used to have all our IT support done by a 3rd party, but we brought it back in house for massive cost savings, so if you could get some background knowledge, when the belts are being tightening you then might find yourself in the right place for a change in departments.... Maybe a long shot though.

Yeah, one of the advantages of being public sector is that it's about as safe as can be. It's just frustrating that it's going literally nowhere as a role, it's gone slowly from a role where I was doing plenty of server-y bits (first department on campus with Exchange, first department with a VPN for remote working, first department to get several other services all thanks to my work) to as you say, pretty much a helpdesk role. I feel totally wasted doing it and I don't feel like I'm actually earning the salary they pay me (the other guy in our office earns roughly half what I do for doing what feels like the same job, most days) so it's not a good way of feeling like a happy employee. I know what you're saying though, unfortunately at the same time I'm totally sick of doing support work, I've had enough of helping people who ask for help when what they really want is someone to just do everything for them and therefore they refuse to listen to what you tell them, in order to learn how to do it themselves next time.

Did the CCNA exam in under 8 weeks start to finish, didn't bother with CCENT.

Attained CCNP in a year (3 months per exam) (4 exams when I completed it back in 2010)

CCNA exam isn't easy, to give yourself a realistic chance of studying and passing the exam I'd say you need 6 months (yes you can probably do it quicker as per the post above - but I really wouldn't recommend trying to).

Network administration as an area is huge, may I suggest you look at other networking kit, for example, firewalls as there are a number of options there and they're a bit less obvious than the Cisco exams so you may find the job market a little less crowded.

I should have pointed out that I had a little bit of experience as well. If you haven't got any experience at all then 6 months is definitely more realistic

Juniper are a growing alternative if you want to check them out.

You'd be jumping into an already crowded field IMHO.

Being in a safe job isn't to be sneered at right now. Bored and paid is better than bored and unpaid.

If you want to get more 'excitement' from your IT work then you'll probably have to specialise and probably leave the public sector. You current employer doesn't care what you can do or what you're capable of as long as you're doing what they need you to do.

One of our guys recently got a good job with a military helicopter manufacturer (or bits of helicopters) with lots of foreign travel, more money and new toys to play with. He was a linux geek and his specialism with us was on SSL VPN gateways and secure remote access.

Trends for the future are very much flexible working outwith the office and BYOD for cost saving. So look into those technologies, like SSLVPNs, and related products to manage access.

DME Excitor and Good For Enterprise for device control.

Unified Comms and unified security devices are also in vogue at the moment.

Social networking will always be big but unless you stumble onto the next big thing you'll always be playing catchup. Facebook is already on the wane, Twitter on the up but the mob will soon tire of it. 2 years and you'll see something else coming along.

Edited 17 April, 201214 yr by Aspman

All very good points. Dealing with home workers I agree with, it's likely to become a big thing along with unified comms, telepresence/teleconferencing, etc all contributing towards a better work-from-home setup. However I'm not aware of any qualifications in those areas which "formalise" someone's knowledge so any roles are likely to come back to the experience that I don't have and am struggling to get at the moment. And yes, bored and paid is better than bored and unpaid, obviously. But it's getting increasingly harder to come in every day in order to answer the phone to muppets who have no interest in doing anything themselves and demand to be spoonfed or they'll start slagging off the standard of IT support to anyone who'll listen. That and a few other things are making it a pretty demoralising place to work at the moment. But I agree that public sector is generally safer, which is why I'm looking for another safe job rather than heading straight for the private sector. Private sector wages may be better but as long as I get enough to balance the books, that's of secondary importance at the moment.

I also agree that current employers don't necessarily care what I can do, but that comes back to the point that I'm getting paid a high salary compared to the other guy in our team. Yes, we're departmentally paid but at the end of the day it's all "university" money overall, so I'm hoping that someone can pull some strings and get me something more suited to the salary I'm paid rather than leaving me as an overpaid helpdesk person offering poor value-for-money, because that's something they do care about at the moment. Whether it happens or not, who knows, but I can only hope.

Plenty to think about though...

Ahhh the joys of public sector. I don't miss it for one minute. No progression, p1ss poor wages, and having to deal with muppets all day long.

Jumped to private sector back in 2006 and haven't looked back.

When I was in the public sector, the best permanent job I could hope for was £12K and I'd have to work my way up the ladder so to speak.

Got out on £22K in 2006, and am on nearly double that now.

There are still people I used to work with all in the same jobs now as I was 6-7 years ago....

Yep, I'm certainly up against your first and last points. The middle one I'm not so arsed about, it's always nice to have more money but tbh, I'm not too badly off. Moving to a "real job" in the private sector is an option, but ideally I'd want to make sure I had some money saved up first just in case everything went tits up, which puts it quite a way off.

Risk is certainly greater in private sector, but the benefits of more pay, quicker progession (provided you are good at it), far outweigh the pros of public sector.

Being "safe" is nice, but it's boring.

YGPM

Interesting thread. I was a network manager/Windows sysadmin/MCSE type role at a school and absolutely hated it. I'm not sure if that's the kind of environment you're in now but regardless, I wouldn't rate it as good at all. As already mentioned, the public sector is full of absolute muppets. I was being paid £18k to run a high school network, and that was supposedly "good" and they wouldn't budge on it. When I finally left, I told them they would have to dig deeper or they're just going to get yet another moron (they wondered why they kept employing useless armchair types who had no idea about servers and hadn't even mastered the art of personal hygiene) - in the end the replacement was an MCSE qualified guy with plenty of experience and was on a starting salary of £28k. Was like a giant metaphorical middle finger as a leaving present. Assholes.

With regards to the way stuff is going, surely you would want to aim higher than a network admin role? In my experience, "admin" roles typically just involve fire fighting and liaising with vegetative end (l)users. Personally I would say an engineer role is more where it's at, but as many have said it's getting a very crowded employment marketplace and it will usually come down to experience.

Plus, I'm a firm believer that in the next 10-15 or more years, local networks will be largely redundant. Cloud cloud cloud is the next move, and being a web developer hopefully I'm (sort of) on the bandwagon.

Edited 26 April, 201214 yr by George512

"Aiming high" is fine, but I'm coming from a role which hasn't done any real networking hands-on since the 3Com SuperStack II was considered a "mid-range" switch. I know what you're saying, but I have to keep this realistic and go for the lowest role I can afford to do, and work my way up. In my opinion, anyway. The stuff I've been applying for, the "end user" would actually be someone in the type of role I'm in now, not an actual "end user" at a desk, so that seems OK to me and would be a comfortable step up from what I'm doing now and a way into that path to be able to take it further. I know what I'm doing with the basics, way more so than most of my non-networking IT colleagues at work, and some of the more advanced stuff, but I'm not capable (yet) of stepping in and taking responsibility for a big multi-site network or anything like that.

As for my environment, I'm in a University so probably the same sort of red tape and nonsense you had at the school but more so, as the budgets are bigger. You're right in that it's a bit "jack of all trades" though, today I've had a Mac user in wanting to change some files on a Linux webserver, someone with a Linux laptop and Windows VM complaining of crashing, I've quickly prepped up a basic (virtually unmanaged) Procurve 2524 to replace a failed switch that's not centrally run, etc. And you're right, "cloud computing" is up and coming, we have our own private "cloud" on campus (two geographically separate datacentres designed with Logicalis) which if anything is proving that we need an even better local network. For example, it's this cloud project which has finally produced the cash for a redundant Internet feed to the MAN that supplies us, it's the cloud project which is now funding multiple "core" switches in key locations around buildings to provide some level of redundancy, there's new SAN networking going in, etc. There's a massive injection of money into the traditional LAN in order for us to get the most out of our "cloud", and I think that while cloud computing is a big deal, on a campus which relies on it the LAN is still just as important as ever. Especially if you get into things like running whole offices with VDI and VOIP where any kind of LAN problem = unproductive staff = lost money.

One area of networking I think that isn't saturated is voice, if you can get in at the bottom at a Telecoms company or IT company that dabbles in Telecoms and can get them to pay for CCNA / CCNP Voice for Cisco Call Manager. Or even a Nortel/Avaya/Mitel house you can end up earning a lot of money if you know the big systems or can specialise in Contact Centre software.

Fair enough, I think I misunderstood and underestimated your current ability from your first post - but reading your reply there does open my eyes! Interesting stuff you mention. I agree on the front of "jack of all trades" especially. Particularly in web development - a freelance developer should have firm grounding in front-end development, back-end, dbadmin and sysadmin, and before you know it that's several different careers rolled into one, not to mention potentially 4+ different languages. Then you have to factor in the design methodologies required and you start venturing into the realms of software architecture, information architecture and system analysis.

By cloud I meant that many SMEs will surely be moving to the cloud for services such as e-mail etc. There are plenty of free and cheap great services out there already (e.g. Google) so you really do have to have a strong argument to justify paying the extortionate prices for Exchange, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "LANS ARE DYING11!!!1", I'm just saying that web really is the way to go, for many companies. Certainly academic establishments and larger businesses cannot qualify as converting to a purely cloud based set up.

There is also to consider however, just how far so many businesses are behind technologically - particularly in the web. There is so many great benefits that could be reaped, that are not. The sad thing is that many idiots are being paid large amounts of money to make these decisions, and yet are completely out of touch with how their field is moving.

As you can see I can be a bit too passionate about all this - ha. And I'll leave it there at the risk of my posts already being severely off topic!

We already use Google Mail for all our student email services, staff are still on Exchange because they need the feature set, they like Outlook as a client, etc. We get Exchange at big discounted rates, so moving to the cloud isn't such a no brainer for us (whereas for a small business paying retail prices for software, it probably is, I've certainly put my dad's small finance company onto Google Apps).

And I definitely know what you mean about public sector and overpaid. My rant of the day yesterday was about a 2 month old service desk ticket concerning student plagiarism due to a bad configuration of software in a teaching lab. I know that I could have had it fixed within 5 minutes using Group Policy, or at least fixed to a level that the plagiarism issue was removed, even if it wasn't a perfect fix. 2 months later, someone has finally managed to find the time to write a single-line batch file, which they've packaged up and deployed through SCCM (which at our place right now isn't even a guaranteed deployment due to PCs not always waking up for overnight maintenance windows correctly), and the fix doesn't actually remove the issue of plagiarism anyway. I looked at the case history, and it's been passed through 4 people, all 2 grades above me, in order to get this non-solution...

Public sector and overpaid? Not sure about that.

Anyway, if you have access to the call, I would suggest putting a suggested fix in there.

In one role I had, I used to **** all sorts of people off because I basically told them how to do their jobs. I was a temp as a 1st line helpdesk monkey and would give solutions to 2nd/3rd line problems. No wonder they only wanted to employ for a month in that temp role

Honestly, the best move I ever made was getting out of the public sector. Hitting nearly £40K at the moment, whereas if I had stayed, I'm damn sure I'd be struggling to get into the mid-£20K range. (Bearing in mind I'd moved on 6 years ago)

Edited 27 April, 201214 yr by g_tee

Well, relatively overpaid. Or perhaps a better way to put it would be "offers poor value-for-money"?

I was tempted to put my thoughts into the call, but I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to have access to it, and if I point out that I do they'll check and remove it. And it comes in handy being able to see all tickets in the service desk, not just my department, as it makes it easier to spot certain types of issues...

The only reasons to want to work in public sector IT are

1 - You're not good enough / too lazy to get a job in the private sector

2 - You have particular personal needs which mean you need the public sector flexibility more than the money.

Now I'm obviously generalising but I'd stand by that.

The first one pretty much describes me. I got into it straight out of college as it was the first decent job I was offered. Couple of years there, and my manager from my first job moved to where I now work, so very shortly a role came up that he suggested I go for, and I ended up here. Before you know it, I've been here for 10 years this year, taken a bit of a step back and an "am I really still happy here?" moment and realised that no, I'm not really and it's time to try and sort it out.

Personal needs not so much, although I do have a child so I'd need a certain amount of flexibility around her, realistically though I just book off whatever holiday I need as holiday well in advance and aside from that, as me and her mum have split up so her mum does all the weekday stuff. I've always been happy with what I get paid here, but it's getting hard work paying the mortgage, bills, taxes etc on my own so more money would certainly go down a storm at the moment.

Have to say getting annual leave in the public sector was a bloody doddle. I could generally say that afternoon that I wanted the next day off and I could do it.

Private sector does have it's downsides that way.

The only reasons to want to work in public sector IT are

1 - You're not good enough / too lazy to get a job in the private sector

2 - You have particular personal needs which mean you need the public sector flexibility more than the money.

Now I'm obviously generalising but I'd stand by that.

I'd say that sums it up nicely.

I actually knew a few really damn good techies where I worked, just couldn't be bothered to go and put the effort in to go somewhere else. That was their call, I'm not judging them.