There’s so many paths in his biz. I know some folks who’ve done really well being dyed in the wool Cisco cultists, but most went straight to CCIE and specialized in things like Cisco telephony or security/firewalls.
AWS is also very hot right now, as are the other virtualization/“cloud” platforms.
The really critical part is learning how it all fits together. I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years who knew their little piece of IT, and knew it so well they were brilliant at it, but were stumped when their laptop couldn’t resolve DNS.
That always made me nervous when I later realized they wrote the network stack for a product.
At the beginning stages I can’t see a Cisco cert hurting anyone other than if they still teach their weird version of the network layer model, it’ll mess the person up if they speak it to someone who learned the OSI model.
And learning a layered model does help with troubleshooting. It’s very difficult to communicate with a tech who’s troubleshooting when they don’t know what you mean by “Have you completely checked Layer 1?”
Or worse, when you say, “There’s no link light on the Ethernet...” and they say, “Think we should reinstall the browser?” “No, that’s Layer 7 and Layer 1 is broken...” And you get a blank stare.
Or “I’m getting a destination host unreachable message”, and “Okay so we know we are dealing with Layer 3 and down...”, another blank stare...
None of the layered models is perfect, but they’ll save a whole bunch of time troubleshooting and talking about the problem if everybody knows them.
Another very good one these days in some shops is knowing Windows Server inside and out, but especially if you can apply it to security. Knowing how to make a Windows network behave and control all the desktop/laptop systems from the day they walk in the door and get the company’s image or automated rebuild put on them, through automated patching and maintenance, until they’re wiped clean and headed for the electronic recycling place, and knowing that entire lifecycle is big, if you like end users and not server side stuff.
Security has always paid pretty well, but people who can build and maintain an automated security policy and audit it in an automated way aren’t ever going to be wanting for work. Both user side and sever side.
It’s hard to say what all the trends will be at any one time. Definitely virtualized / “cloud” is the high traffic area right now. AWS being the heavy hitter in that space.
Oh yeah,
@gkainz would be grumpy if I didn’t mention DBA work. Actually out of all of them, DBA pays the best to newbies, because the problems and their scale are already usually really big in most companies you’d start at. Few junior DBAs will be building a database architecture from scratch unless they’re the only DBA at a startup, and that’s somewhat dangerous for the company.
So junior DBAs often step right into big problems and do a lot of mentorship from their senior DBAs. If you like the sorts of problems DBAs work on, its a solid choice for a specialty pretty much always, too. But lots of people don’t like working in SQL all day at that level, so that one depends on the person.
