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The Cisco path to a good job?

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Hey all,

A quick background about myself. I’ve been in the Call Center industry for about 5 years now the last two of which I have been in Operations Planning as an Analyst for a worldwide company. Previous to this I went to tech school and picked up my A+ cert, NT 4.0, Win95/98, MCP and MOUS in a Compuer Operating System Technician course that ended me up nowheres.

Said company that I work for now provide free online training to it’s employees and my interest in networking is leading me to begin my CCNA training while I work.

Eventually I want to expand from the CCNA to improve my marketability. My main concern though is the number of years experience most companies require. I’d eventually want to end up as a security analyst, however the point is to get myself a job in a market I enjoy.

I was told by another Tech friend of mine that given a CCNA+specialization, I should have little difficulty finding work. Assuming that completing CCNA is a given down the road, what suggestions do you all have as far as entry level jobs, future additions to my eductaion, and general paths to success to get somewheres in this field?

Topic

Certifications don’t guarantee anything without experience

In reply to The Cisco path to a good job?

Certs are nice to have, but without actuall real work knowledge and experience, you won’t stand a chance at the interview and they will see right through you. The 1990s’ were so plagued with “paper certs” from MCSEs’ to CCNAs’ who simply remembered the textbook answers to the exam questions and got their certs, but couldn’t fix a broken server or corrupt routing table if their lives depended on it. With this in mind, employers are now seriously grilling individuals on the interviews with non-texbook technical questions based on ever day scenarios and require a minimum of 3 to 5 years experience for junior level positions. Unfortunately, on the job training and entry level positions are things of the past and are a rarity these days. Unless you know your stuff, no employer will be so generous as to take you in, train you at their expense, and then have you jump ship for another company that pays higher. Not long ago, I had an interesting conversation with a reputable technical recruiter who told me about a 19 year guy who sent in his resume. The guy had certifications up the wazoo from MS, Novell, Cisco, Oracle, etc. and was demanding a $150,000 a year salary, yet had little to no professional work experience, but thought he was worth that much because he was certified. Yes, you can be certified with enough certificates to wallpaper your livingroom with, but age and work experience also factors into how much you are worth and how much others think you are worth.

cisco or cissp or experience?

In reply to The Cisco path to a good job?

If you want to move into the security field, you may want to go for the cissp certification in favor of the CCNA cert.

Neither assures anything, because while some places require certs to consider you, experience rules – especially when you show up to work. They’re not going to be throwing multiple choice questions at you, they’re gonna ask you to configure a switch or figure out why the network is slow every tuesday and thursday at 3 PM.

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