Any network engineers here?

[Raze]

Will, this is the time for you to up your skills. If you add vmware to your skills as a network engineer. i think you will get a really good day rate kinda 350 -400.

Now a days, you cant be Jack of ONE trade .. Clients want you to be Jack of Every trade . lol

This is true, it’s more or less like that in my permanent role now. About 50% networking and the other 50 a mix of Vmware, NetApp, and a bit of Linux. So just trying to learn as much of that stuff as I can while studying for ccnp and then see what I can do from there.

I do want to get into contracting but I'll be honest, taking the leap of leaving a perm role without having the qualifications and experience I think I'll need to keep getting contracts, has me holding back for now at least.

[Scoobos]

In answer to the OP.

I believe its getting better month on month now, been lively for at least since Jan.

However, going into consultancy isnt as simple as doing exams. Anyone can do exams - its building the experience to know how to advise clients how to act - not doing things for the first time , blagging expertise in something you've only done in the lab.

Get involved in as many disasters as a FTE as you can, i reckon thats the best way to learn for when you are accountable and sueable (?) for your actions as a business.

[Raze]

Sounds like good advice, thanks.

[smatty]

There are jobs and contracts around if you're any good and willing to move. If you've not got much experience then going FTE somewhere to get a few years and maybe help with CCNP would be a good move.

I've interviewed and worked with some useless CCIEs in the last few years and would say it's been devalued a lot lately, possibly by the bootcamps. It's a great qualification and learning experience but don't expect to be worth more just for having it. If you had it then you'd get interviews more easily, but if you can't back it up with experience and senior level knowledge then it's worthless.

[pauanui]

my 0.02c

Cisco isn't the only path to take. F5, Checkpoint and Juniper can be just as useful. Network security is a massive growth area, with every vendor and his dog offering "next-gen firewalls", or morphing their existing product suite to provide NGF featuresets (Sourcefire, F5.) This allows you to diversify your skillset whilst staying on a networking path. Cisco's UCS and Nexus 1000V switches allows exposure to virtualised hardware whilst staying on the Cisco path.

This is an alternative to diversifying too much with VMWare/Wintel/Linux. I don't personally think that being a jack-of-all-trades is a great idea. It is fantastic and very useful to have exposure to other areas of infrastructure, in terms of being able to speak Linux or AD or VMWare at a basic level, but I think a basic understanding is enough for a Network Engineer.

Big corporates, banks, insurance companies, large tech companies - they're going to have teams which specialise in different areas. I am finishing up a perm role now, but there are 100 infrastructure people separated across their specialities of virtualisation, network routing & switching engineers, network security engineers, security , risk & policy people, MS/AD designers, MS/AD engineers, Linux engineers, front-end web engineers, and database engineers. It helps to easily identify what team you fit into.

The other option is becoming an absolute pro at everything and becoming some sort of Infrastructure Architect, but I don't have the time or motivation for that, at least at the moment.

[Raze]

Yea that's the problem with being the jack of all trades you master none. You have to be some kind of super geek/genius to know networking /Vmware /storage /Linux /Ad to an in-depth level.

We currently use riverbeds and f5s in my current role so I'm getting good exposure to those. After completing my ccnp I'm thinking to learn some juniper but the only problem is we don't use it at my workplace but I believe it's just learning the different commands since most of the routing technology is the same.

Would love to learn checkpoint as well but again it's not used at my work they use fwsm and asa's here. And I don't like getting certs where I've had no practical experience using the equipment.