WTF is a Cisco focused Associates? College degree’s shouldn’t specialize in a vendor technology.
If you want to focus in Cisco, get a Cisco Cert. If you want a degree get something that teaches general concepts (and how to learn). A college degree in a skill that will be soon dated is the worst of both worlds and sounds like something one of the for profit diploma mills would come up with.
I get a bachelor degree in management, but supervisor (the roll below management where you can’t hire/fire, don’t come up with policy but are just responsible for telling people to follow it, and doing training). Why on earth would that be something you would get a degree in.
Again, this sounds like a bizare farce/joke.
If your just doing end user stuff, I’d argue your not an IT administrator, your help desk. Nothing wrong with that, just the appropriate title for the job.
Speaking as a former helpdesk/sysadmin for a call center letting green people play with things is a good way to lose a lot of money. if your making ~80 cents a minute per employee, and have 300 people, your potentially loosing over $200 a minute for downtime. The company doesn’t want you to “learn” on production.
So build a home lab, and go learn there. (VMware Hands on labs will get you started with virtualiation, Microsoft Tech-ED can get yo started on their stuff, Cisco simulators can get you through CCNP). Build a small VM cluster at home, and learn and then, maybe just then someone might let you learn.
I was lucky. My boss was understaffed (and I openly joked with him dumb) enough to give me domain admin credentials, and root/enable passwords and let me learn in production. Some days I did great things. Others… Well don’t turn on Netflows on a 2801 running 10+ Mbps of traffic.
Fundamentally I learned, because they were too cheap to hire properly. Eventually after a year I got the hang of things and provided value. Your employee might be “smarter” in which case your odds of learning things “on the job” are likely low.
