Infrastructure engineer as a career

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36 posts

Geek

#1391181 21-Sep-2015 12:38

On top of everything else that has been added, the pathways I see are;
- Get true IT experience from your present company (they may help you to do this from a staff retention standpoint and that you are already a known quantity)
- Get certification from an external provider
- Jump ship to a provider and accept that you may have to "suck eggs" and prove your mettle before progressing upwards. If you choose the right company, this may not be as laborious as you think!
- Leverage your current non IT skills to translate into a higher role. You may have particular skills around customer service, conflict resolution, negotiation, problem solving, documenting and process designing, completing and delivering projects etc. These can be transferable skills and of worth to a company, as a skilled, experienced IT engineer is valuable, but one that can understand the customers of the business, relate to them and communicate with them = priceless!!!

garretts

12 posts

Geek

#1391183 21-Sep-2015 12:40

I Currently Work Full Time as A Senior Field Engineer. Spend alot of time in DataCentres as well. You will need years of experience under your belt before most companies allow you to work in the DataCentre. they rely Heavily on Certification, and Knowledge and Clearance (police checks Etc). Most Companies wont allow you to work in the datacentre unless you have proven to them. You will also require Discipline (a big thing) as well

Best thing to do is to get some certifications under your belt and start from bottom up either in the helpdesk or at a Junior field Position.

Everyone has given good advice on this post and it will also pay to what they have listened too

It will also help to get comptia A+ or some vendor certifications such as HP, IBM, CISCO etc under your belt. Some companies may even employ you and allow you to do certifications at the same time

Start from scratch working with PCs, Monitors, Keyboards, printers etc and work your way up to servers and networks. Working on PCS can sometimes be more rewarding and difficult than working on servers etc.

macuser

2120 posts

Uber Geek

#1391203 21-Sep-2015 12:43

Tomorrow I am going to see Ames about CCNA + MSCA, they're both $7400 each, so not especially cheap.

I think I will sit CompTIA A+ outside of AMES, not really worth spending $7400 for basic training - the exams themselves are about $700 through a third party.

I'll need to look at other providers for ITIL and AWS, I would rather have them under student loan but I don't find any one who offers the certs as part of a course.

xpd

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#1391207 21-Sep-2015 12:47

I did my A+ with AMES in 2003, wish I didnt and had just paid for the exams instead... wouldve saved time and money ;)

With the Comptia stuff, just as easy to teach yourself via the many sites out there with information, or if you need to, order the books from Amazon for 1/3 the price you'll pick them up in NZ for.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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garretts

12 posts

Geek

#1391209 21-Sep-2015 12:49

macuser: Tomorrow I am going to see Ames about CCNA + MSCA, they're both $7400 each, so not especially cheap. I think I will sit CompTIA A+ outside of AMES, not really worth spending $7400 for basic training I'll need to look at other providers for ITIL and AWS, I would rather have them under student loan but I don't find any one who offers the certs as part of a course.

All of these you can actually sit with out doing the actual course and do self study

How ever I did my ccna through a course and Found it helpful. Did A+ self study and the 2x exams are easy

macuser

2120 posts

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#1391213 21-Sep-2015 12:54

How does CCNA and MSCA help with pay scale and job opportunities?

Does every candidate have those two certifications or are they rare?

Will I look good having them, trying to get into entry level sever and data technician role?

Thank you to all posters for their insight

xpd

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#1391241 21-Sep-2015 13:16

CCNA will cover the networking side of things (personally Id go for this over Network+) as well as basic CISCO IOS configs etc.
So yes, I believe it would look good

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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wasabi2k

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#1391253 21-Sep-2015 13:42

CCNA is more if you are going the networking route.

MCSA is if you want to work with windows servers.

Roles that do both aren't that common in larger organisations, where you normally split out networks and servers.

Having said that server people that understand networks are twice as useful.

Lias

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#1391285 21-Sep-2015 13:54

wasabi2k:
Having said that server people that understand networks are twice as useful.

Yep, but the furthest you'd probably ever take it would be CCNP, and even that's pushing it.

I'm a geek, a gamer, a dad, a Quic user, and an IT Professional. I have a full rack home lab, size 15 feet, an epic beard and Asperger's. I'm a bit of a Cypherpunk, who believes information wants to be free and the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. If you use my Quic signup you can also use the code R570394EKGIZ8 for free setup.

wasabi2k

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#1391308 21-Sep-2015 14:26

Lias:
wasabi2k:
Having said that server people that understand networks are twice as useful.

Yep, but the furthest you'd probably ever take it would be CCNP, and even that's pushing it.

Absolutely - CCNA would be as far as I would bother if you aren't doing specialist networking.

macuser

2120 posts

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#1498716 24-Feb-2016 18:58

Half way through CCNA now after completing MCSA at the end of the year. I would say 12 weeks on each course 5 days a week is still barely enough time to prepare for the exams as the world load is significant while also working almost full time self employed, but I'm looking forward to getting into the work force for a bit of a lifestyle change.

I guess my entry dream job is working with some more experienced team members at a large organisation or ISP building networks and or server systems

macuser

2120 posts

Uber Geek

#1513876 15-Mar-2016 17:22

Alright, very very close to wrapping up now (only two weeks until I'm all done) so now it's time to transition into work, where is a good place to start? eg. companies and roles to watch out for (in Auck) - currently sitting at about 92% grade average for CCNA so hope I can take those skills into work

JamesL

956 posts

Ultimate Geek
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#1513884 15-Mar-2016 17:37

You might need to look at small/medium sized businesses to start off with, to gain experience

I'd be surprised if larger organisations would let you go straight into a server or networking role with only certs to your name, as opposed to experience.

I've seen many MCSE/CCNA types that don't even know the basics so they get exposed pretty quickly.

I started off on the service desk for 6 months before I was lucky enough to get accepted into a Sys Engineer role, that was 10 years ago now.

I progressed from there to Technical Consultant then up to Infrastructure Architecture, but for me there was little enjoyment in doing design work as I'd rather build it than write about it, I prefer to be hands on so now I'm contracting doing Senior Sys Engineer/project work which involves mentoring the "juniors" so to speak.

I found Consulting/Architecture to be very isolating, often working by yourself, whereas I much enjoy working part of a team.

I've worked in both vendor, govt and private and far prefer private. You'll get the same frustrations everywhere but I found working in private in house IT type environments to be on the better side.

The only certifications I pursued were Citrix ones, I felt there was little value in Microsoft certs given some of the people I came across and VMware was really being pushed so I figured the market would be saturated with VMware certified people.

macuser

2120 posts

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#1513892 15-Mar-2016 18:03

JamesL:

You might need to look at small/medium sized businesses to start off with, to gain experience

I'd be surprised if larger organisations would let you go straight into a server or networking role with only certs to your name, as opposed to experience.

I've seen many MCSE/CCNA types that don't even know the basics so they get exposed pretty quickly.

I started off on the service desk for 6 months before I was lucky enough to get accepted into a Sys Engineer role, that was 10 years ago now.

I progressed from there to Technical Consultant then up to Infrastructure Architecture, but for me there was little enjoyment in doing design work as I'd rather build it than write about it, I prefer to be hands on so now I'm contracting doing Senior Sys Engineer/project work which involves mentoring the "juniors" so to speak.

I found Consulting/Architecture to be very isolating, often working by yourself, whereas I much enjoy working part of a team.

I've worked in both vendor, govt and private and far prefer private. You'll get the same frustrations everywhere but I found working in private in house IT type environments to be on the better side.

The only certifications I pursued were Citrix ones, I felt there was little value in Microsoft certs given some of the people I came across and VMware was really being pushed so I figured the market would be saturated with VMware certified people.

Thanks for the info mate, very helpful!

I'm lucky enough to spend quite a bit of time with the cisco gear in my class, plenty of L2, L3 switches and cisco routers. A lot of time configuring them in both IPv4 and IPV6. CCNA now has a lot about EIGRP, OSPF multi area, RPVST, VLAN and ACL in both protocols which I think is a bit different than yesteryear, we all put that to hardware via CLI. MSCA was very practical as well in the same regard, though the only issue is that neither focus on non cisco/Microsoft products so it's just about translating that to other products.

I don't think I will be able to jump straight into an engineering junior role straight away either, but I'd like to start in the best place possible so I can learn skills and methods suitable for corporate.

JamesL

956 posts

Ultimate Geek
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#1513903 15-Mar-2016 18:44

Nice, well good luck with the job hunting - I hope it goes well.

I find Seek and Trademe are good, I usually filter words like Citrix, Engineer, Contract and get daily emails from both, always good to have options. I also seem to get a lot of calls from recruiters that find me on Linkedin, so that's another good resource to use.

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