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So recently I have been considering making a move over into corporate IT. Currently I own a small MSP business and I feel like it is time to move on to something different. So my question to my fellow spice heads is two fold.

First off I currently do not have any certs or a degree but I do have many years of experience. I have a lot of experience in networking and I would like to get a career in networking or cloud infrastructure. I have looked through many job openings online and many prefer or require certs of varying degrees. So my first question is what certs would be the best to invest my time in getting to certify my years of experience?

My other question is with about eight years of overall IT experience and about five years of networking experience, what kind of positions would be available to me assuming that my experience is consider average for my time in IT (e.g. help desk, network engineer, etc…)?

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CCNA,CCNP…or if you are really fit in networking directly CCIE.

Networking engineer… most of the job openings i see for that title… are more sys admin, jack of all and more trades. :o/

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Get some certs in what you want to do, networking and server administration.

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It sounds like you have interest in “networking.” I would second Neally’s comments on the CCNA/CCNP track. I work with quite a few manufacturers, and those certifications will not only help you build knowledge of Cisco products, but the knowledge you gain from studying will translate to other manufacturers. If you understand technologies as a whole, you’ll be marketable.

Considering you own a small MSP, I’m guessing you have some business and soft skills as well. Those can be marketable, even for technical roles such as network engineers.

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Are you sure? Do you have an “in” somewhere? Have you looked around at the job market? I’m not doubting your skills, I’ve seen your posts. Gillette is a small town, so you’re going to want to be careful. If word get’s around that you’re applying for jobs, your current clients could bolt. Even with a few certs it’s likely you’ll be starting at the bottom, for what I’m guessing will be less money than you’re making now. I know where you’re at, I’ve considered the same thing many, many times. It would be nice to have a real vacation. It would be nice to have a co-worker. A lot of benefits to working for someone, a lot of benefits to working for yourself too. I can make more money standing on my head than I ever would working for someone else. Btw, years ago I lived in Sheridan. I loved it out there. Good luck.

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I know that here the senior cloud IN and senior NET E guys have to have a bachelor’s and the NET E guys have to have a CCNP otherwise you get the network technician title and the pay associated with it. It will be a hard time getting through HR without a bachelors…

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Huh, Scott Allen Miller would beg to differ with you about the need for a degree. He does have a point that someone who hangs that much on a degree clearly doesn’t understand the IT arena in general and maybe you don’t want to work there.

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Sounds like your company artificially restricts their hiring of infrastructure and networking people based on an arbitrary expenditure of 4 years and money.

This leads to

  1. Substandard IT staff. Infrastructure hiring is competitive and if you ignore half of the talent you are going to get the left overs more often than not unless you…

  2. Pay significantly above market rate. Every time you add an arbitrary 50% filter on the market but need talent at xxx level you have to start paying more than everyone else would for talent without that filter. Back when I was a hiring manager if I had had this arbitrary filter I would have had to pay an extra 20-30% just to get the same tier of talent.

Now I guess this is good for people who have degree’s and skills and can find jobs that overpay for them, but even then they end up often pigeonholing themselves early by doing this so a lot of us just ignore it.

The biggest issue is that real colleges don’t actually teach networking and infrastructure. This is almost as bad as hiring based on age, gender, race etc. Its just an arbitrary thing that hiring for communicates that you don’t know what you are looking for (and that your hiring managers or HR are a terrible mess). Its a general warning sign that if your using it for non-entry level positions real professionals should avoid you as an employer.

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To be blunt years don’t mean anything about your skills. I’ve known people who had 20 years of SMB MSP experience. Their networking skills were laughable in any enterprise network, they were lost/confused with VDI, or Virutalization or shared storage.

The good news is that years of experience generally lend towards having empathy for user issues, being able to communicate, being able to navigate office politics, project management, time management and a lot of things that do have value.

I would recommend moving into a midsized company. You can generally parlay your existing skills of jack of all trades a little better there, as well as your soft skills can likely help.

A CCNA might give you a jump start (and it rounds out a lot of troubleshooting skills for larger environments, because if you don’t understand the OSI its hard for people to teach you things).

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You might reach out to a local or regional ISP. That can be a good environment to grow in your networking skills, and also lend a hand with server sysadmin and other items you might be good at.

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Maybe your statements were correct 10 years ago. But now i strongly disagree. Any company with a sizeable cloud or service provider network presence has an HR department. I’m just posting based on what I experience in my company. Our public and private cloud is all vmware. So I have no clue what other places do or require. I know for a fact that our HR looks for people who have 4 year degrees. We currently have 4 cloud markets spread across the USA.

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hi, so lots of good advice here.

I was in a similar position, and was advised to get some certs (I had none), this was purely to get noticed off the resume. (in general) corporates like to see certs.

of course certs don’t mean you can do the job, your experience does.

I recommend perhaps getting some exam dumps of CCNA and M$ courses, as it is possible that you can pass the exams with a little study of how the exams work (the questions in M$ are really weird!) and what they are looking for.

also remember that when applying for jobs, most HR have no clue and recruiters are almost as bad. so make sure the resume closely matches the requirements on the job description.

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Scott does not discourage degrees, he discourages going into a ton of debt for something that most likely won’t pay off for most people in IT.

Avoid the state schools that will cost you $60K to $100K for a 4 year degree. Look at a 2 year tech degree or something similar for a reasonable price (sub $20K).

In your case you have some experience. I would just get some certs, CCNA, Net+, Microsoft, etc. But don’t expect a huge starting salary. You will have to work your way up once you get your foot in the door.

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You mean private school right? There are plenty of state schools you can get out for less than this if you do it right…

2 Year degree’s ROI is pretty low. Default rate on them is higher, and Its insanely rare that someone has an education requirement and it is not a 4 yr degree.

Honestly I would just go no degree over 2 year.

The key to this field isn’t high starting salaries. It is rapid salary growth capability. You can triple your salary in a few years if you like to learn, can communicate well, and are willing to move to a place where " real jobs happen".

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Hey,

You will most likely be a fit for a small-medium size business. 8 years can get you a sys admin role or an IT manager role. You own a company and juggle all the business and tech that comes along with that. The right companies will recognize what you have done up until this point. I would hold off and see how applying goes with what you have. You will definitely get your foot in the door in my opinion, after a few conversations with hiring managers you will see how well you stack up on the networking side. I would only see you at the enterprise level for more IT Help Desk Management and you could work your way up from there. You will just have to cope with the fact that your freedom and variety of work will degrade as you become more specialized, it’s obvious but not something an entrepreneur and a generalist is always ready for.

Good Luck!

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It’s often who you know that will get you in the door, and if that’s the case, certs might not matter. I didn’t have all the certs that this position should really have, but I have strong people skills and a varied background with proven fast on the job learning. I prob. would not be here without the contact I had. I’m here 7 months now and I’m fully ingrained in the IT team at this point. If you don’t know someone the certs will be more important because many places will weed candidates out who don’t have the certs they feel one needs to do the job.

Good luck…

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First off thank you to everyone who took the time to replay. I very much appreciate your input.

Sid,

I do understand that Gillette WY is a small community but my clients do not use Spiceworks and so I do have some privacy, but thank you for your concern. Also I am not looking for other employment in the Wyoming area but looking to move out of the state.

I do realize that certs do not mean you know what you are doing, I look at them as a why to get the attention of those who are looking at my resume. I am fairly advanced in my knowledge of networking though not with Cisco specific equipment. I am heavily experienced with the environment SonicWALL and I have some minor experience with other enterprise brands such as ADTRAN.

As far as salary goes I do not expect to be making $80,000 a year or even close to that starting out when moving over to the corporate world. I do not mind starting low for pay and working my way up, that has kind of been the world I am living in right now due to the growth of my business. As the years have gone by I have gained more clients and contracts, kind of the same.

A few of you mentioned soft skills. I have done customer service for IT and industrial automation as well as the aviation industry for many years. Because I have owned two companies and been an R&D department manager in the energy industry I have been the sales guy, the meet with investors guy, the tech support guy, and the get yelled at by clients and customers guy for many years. I like people and I like helping them solve their technical issues so I would not have a problem working on the help desk side of things for a while to get my career moving. I know from many years of experience that engineers, programmers, and IT people are not always the best when it comes to interpersonal skills but I love the personal interactions, even with the difficult people.

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CCNA does absolutely nothing for any corporate networking job that I’ve ever seen.

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I hate the constant dismissal of everyone who knows something about good hiring processes as “being old” or something, as if we dont’ current look for jobs like everyone else. Needing a degree is LESS needed today than it was ten or twenty years ago, far less. And the HR thing doesn’t apply, NO serious first uses HR as a gatekeeper - none. That’s something that some medium businesses with crappy IT and no good management do because they can’t figure out how to hire. That’s NOT how the enterprise corporate world works, it could not.

If YOUR HR requires four year degrees, all you’ve done is point out that your management doesn’t have a clue about hiring and doesn’t see their staff as a strategic asset. Sure, bad companies exist, no one claims that htey don’t. But we do claim that most companies and certainly not companies you want to work at do this… they can’t. Logically you can’t want to hire the best and the brightest if you are ruling out the people who are self starters, self educated or too successful to have spent time in college.

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Can’t get a CCNP without CCNA ;o) and if you have a CCIE, you don’t need a CCNP ¯_(ツ)_/¯