Looking for advice: Previously a senior network engineer (10yr) turned sales role over the last 5 years, how can I get back into networking? What’s your story?
My wife asked me the other day, "What's been your favorite job?" And it really made me think about what I actually enjoy doing. I was a network engineer in all sorts of capacities, support type roles, consulting, professional services, standard enterprise, and a medium/large isp. I then got into automation, led me to Python, that led to cloud, kubernetes, then ended up in a DevOps type sales role. Started pre sales, now I’ve moved post sales as a csm at an ai company.
To be fair, I originally took the csm role so I could stop traveling so much from my previous pre sales role. But I think it’s proven to be a bit too far from what I’m mostly interested in doing.
So it’s been about 5 years since I last had a network engineer title but when thinking about the jobs I’ve really enjoyed the most it comes back to those roles. I miss building things, troubleshooting really deep narrow issues, labbing, constant pursuit of learning the next thing, even the occasional pager buzz to fix some random outage someone forgot to set the time to roll their eigrp auth key chain on one side of the link, all that stuff.
I used to spend HOURS watching Brian McGahan, Jeremy Cioara, rob rikers listening to packet pushers, reading Jeff Doyle, I was really into it. And I still do when I have time. I look back and can’t believe I left a job that was also something I really enjoyed doing and learning. I guess I thought I’d like the customer facing roles more, but now I’m certain this ain’t it.
In all my recent roles I’ve constantly thought “ah I wish I knew how this worked back when I worked as an engineer” so I still follow the industry and tinker with networking all the time.
So, I want to get a fresh start and land a network engineer role. Curious what you’d recommend I focus on as someone with experience but out of the discipline for a while. Should I renew expired certs, ccnp, aws or gcp something entirely different? Are boot camps still a thing? What are the top skills these days? Open to any and all advice. Would you apply for senior as before or start back at non senior roles?
I know the whole “how do I become a network engineer” topic is beat to death and there’s tons of resources out there, so maybe you could instead tell your story if you did something similar? I’d be curious to hear how other people have left networking and got back into it some time after a departure.
I’m in Dublin, Ireland for context.