Bewbies

Mildly Menacing Medic
@chuckwagon

Interesting story. Good to see you landed on your feet. Regarding your next career goals, Cisco is a very common progression from where you are now. As you hinted at, though, there is a big danger of Cisco-based roles being taken by offshore and H1B folks. 11/12 of my Cisco Call Manager admins, for example, are located offshore. Regarding IOS/network ops, 100% of our task workers ("flip this port") are offshore. In our industry, if there is no reason for them to be physically onsite, they should be offshore for cost savings. Not trying to scare you, really.

One way to mitigate this danger is to get settled in a federally-regulated environment such as utilities, finance, or defense. There are many audit requirements that keep activities and information from being handled overseas.

Something you might want to consider: Cisco identity management. It's been around for a while, in different forms, CNAC/Anyconnect/ISE etc, but still has tons of potential to grow. Take a look if you haven't already.

It's very easy to get stuck where you are now.. people often sit in Tier2 for years because they're comfortable and the pay is tolerable. DON'T. Every day should be spent with your next role in mind. To this end, I actually authored a plan to keep my Tier1/2 folks in a position for a maximum of 2 years. Unfortunately abbreviated SCAT: Synergistic Career Advancement Tree. Basically, within 3 months of joining a role, you must pick a specialty.
 
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KillerZebra

Forum Admin
Contributor
Got an email today from an admin. "My printer isn't working anymore"

M9CLAUv.jpg
 

chuckwagon

Legendary Skial King
Contributor
UPDATE:

I am on my 2nd job since the last thread update. I left the desktop support position that I started out on after switching careers to go back to the education world. I worked as a building tech in the school district that I used to teach in. It was a slight pay bump and it cut out my commute (I was commuting about 150 minutes every day round trip). However, the roles and responsibilities were not very challenging, and mostly consisted of telling students and staff that they needed to restart their device. Since then however, I just started a new job this week for a major medical software solutions company. They provide client hosted and remote hosted solutions for medical institutions. I am a back-end System Engineer. I mainly build out, troubleshoot, and maintain the Linux apps and database servers. However I also have to know a little bit of the Citrix front-end, making updates to the gold master. Like I just said, I have just started and am drinking from a firehose, as far as everything that I am learning, but I am excited about the new challenge. I had to go back to driving to Kansas City every day, but it is a way shorter commute (90 minutes round trip)
 

DaivdBaekr

Moderator
Contributor
i'm doing helpdesk at a refinery now

you'd really think people would close their titty pic emails while i'm helping them, but no
 

chuckwagon

Legendary Skial King
Contributor
I have zero qualifications but would enjoy working a helpdesk job
Is this feasible
If you have customer service experience with some technical knowledge you should be able get a helpdesk position. In my limited experience, helpdesk is trying to solve the easy issues, and you normally have steps to follow for common problems. If you cannot fix it then, escalate to tier 2.