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Hello,

It’s been a very long time since I posted here. I feel as I am directionless. Below is my experience:

Technical Support Specialist for large company: 7 months

Junior Systems Admin for small business: 3 years

market managed services engineer at data center: 3 months

Currently I am part of the engineering team at a data center. I’m doing tier 3 support and provisioning. I have never seen VMware environments this vast before. It’s stressful but also top notch working experience. If I can survive here I can survive almost anywhere. Thinking ahead(at least 2-4 years). What do you think is next for my career path? I really have no idea to be honest.

I feel like I rose very quickly in the IT field. I have 0 certs. I might want to go for my CCNA but it is just boring and hard to get motivated after work. Any advise would be welcome. I feel as though I have hit a rut and have zero goals. Which is a very unattractive thing to have in my opinion.

Everyone I work with is way older than me. People my age are below me and always complain about their pay. I had to go through a long dark road of despair in order to reach this point. I guess I am kind of bitter. This was the position that I have been gunning for since my first day in IT. I don’t see the value in certifications. How do I stop this trend? Any career advice would be welcome. Trying to get this put into IT best practices\Careers by the way.

4 Spice ups
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Sorry, but what’s the trend that you want to stop? Is it that you dislike certs but want to like them? Or you’ve gone too far too fast in your field and you want to slow down? :wink: If that’s the case, just stay where you are until people catch up to you and go back to a more traditional growth trajectory :wink:

I kid, of course, but I’m not clear what trend you want to reverse, it sounds like you’re doing great and are just wondering “where next?”

If so, that’s not a field decision but a career one. What do you WANT to be doing? What is your dream job in 5 - 10 - 15 years? What things do you like/dislike?

1 Spice up
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Do you want to stay in a datacenter, yet move into the enterprise space, or do you want to move into enterprise other than a datacenter?

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Id argue the functional difference between enterprise work and data center work is I’d your the guy who racks stuff. (I don’t understand why this is viewed as a skill in IT).

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I’m an Engineer at the data center. I handle break/fix over hundreds of different environments and provisioning. The NOC guys are the ones who rack and stack. I just don’t know where to go after this. Maybe specialize in virtualization? Who knows! Management maybe? I do not want to be on call for 24 hours for the rest of my life. Especially when I have children.

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Hm, I don’t think I phrased that properly. Let me try again. Do you want to stick to datacenters, network operations, and the like, or would you prefer to branch off toward management, or perhaps engineering?

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If you get into a larger environment, you can split on-call duties with others, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

1 Spice up
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If you don’t want to be on-call all the time, then you need to shoot for larger organizations. In my current position I manage the virtual environment along with another coworker, and unless I’m on-call I rarely do after-hours work. We go on-call for two week periods about once every 3.5 months, which is really nice.

You need to sit down and think about what it is that you like most and least about your job. Do you like the technical aspect? Do you like being the “go-to” guy for certain things? Are you more drawn to the management aspect? Make a list of the things that you like and the things that you hate about your job, and then you’ll know where you want to be.

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Each roll can be flexible or 24 hour hell depending on where you work really. I’m oncall one out of 4 weeks, and for the most part don’t get woken up at 3am.

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It looks like you need to decide first whether you want to stay in the technical side of IT or move to management, then decide whether you want to continue specializing in certain areas or move to a more general IT position. If you like doing the virtualization stuff, maybe look for a role at a consulting agency or find a job in a large enterprise. If you like networking, get some certs. If you would rather do a little bit of everything, find a nice network or sys admin job in a mid-large enterprise.

If you have no idea what you want, look back at some of the projects you have worked on. Which ones did you enjoy? Which ones did you hate? Maybe you’ll find that you’d rather do less on the IT side and more on the engineering side. Who knows!

The point is, only you can determine what direction you want to go. If you can’t decide, then sit back and just enjoy the ride. See where life takes you.