Is Network Engineering a Viable Career? 229
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm fresh out of high school and interested in getting a job in networking. One option is a degree in networking, the alternative I've considered is just getting certificates (CCNA/P, A+, MCSA). A large factor in my decision is which route is most likely to land a secure and well-paid full time job. I'm located in Melbourne, Australia and I don't have any local contacts in the industry who can advise me, and so was hoping some other Australian (or international) readers could share their knowledge and experience with these issues."
School (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether you go for networking or psychology is up to you, but the people you meet in college and the opportunity to interact with the faculty is not an opportunity you should pass up... Assuming it's an option for you without too many negative consequences.
Re:School (Score:5, Informative)
I'd recommend you go to school.
Ditto. In 10 or 20 years, a CCNA or whatever from 2007 will be effectively worthless. However, a B.Sc. degree will still mean quite a bit. Now, the degree does not absolve you pursuing continuing education and bettering yourself, but it is a much better foundation for your career. Think long term.
Re:School (Score:4, Insightful)
After you get your first job, it's very unlikely that basic certs like the CCNA will help you much at all. Advanced certs like the CCIE or the CISSP can help out quite a bit, but having experience with a degree is better. I got hired on to a company with a lot of guys I graduated college with, and just about all of us have let our certs expire. Those that have their resume posted to monster/careerbuilder still get plenty of job offers.
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I'm a telephony engineer working on my CCVP cert. This is an area of networking that's exploding.
More VOIP is going into offices (esp new offices) and Cisco is pretty much at the center
of it because it allows companies to have one vendor, one support contract, one support team, etc.etc.
to handle their network AND telephony...BIG cost savings. I'm not saying Cisco is the only vendor in this space
but they are HUGE, and if you get a CCVP, you're going
More on school (Score:3, Informative)
Getting TO THE QUESTION:
You are always, always, ALWAYS more employable and more promotable (not to mention more PAYABLE) with a bachelor's degree than without. It is ALWAYS worth getting a bachelor's degree. I might go so far as to say it's also always worth getting a master's degree too, as MSs are becoming the new BSs.
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If you think all that comes out of a classic CS degree is what you can pick up from internet faqs, then you don't understand what college is for. I am sorry that you are so short-sighted. I can recognized the value of both a college degree and the hands-on-experience gained from researching things yourself and/or being on the job. I would not hire
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Ahh yes another argument over the usefulness of a college or university education. Can't fault you for not doing what you don't believe in, but I'd find your position more convincing if you had a degree. As it is, your sour grapes attitude shines through.
> the classes I did take were at least five to ten years out of date anyways
Well then you really missed the boat there. What is taught, or should be taught-- not all colleges can resist the pressure to teach "relevant" material-- are ideas that ne
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You are not supposed to count the digits to the right of the decimal point, if you had a degree you would have known that
Joking aside, for those who can no longer get a degree (too old, bad socio-economic situation, whatever), the advice part of your post is spot on. Grab the cert study guides for just their content, i.e. something to structure your studies around, but skip the actual certs. Get lots of used equipment, wire it up into something different ev
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To an extent, I think you're right. There are several things I learned in college that I probably would not have forced myself to tackle on my own: lots of practice with speeches and presentations, books on project management like [i]The Mythical Man Month[/i], and design theory and practice.
Those are things you don't pick up from a typical FA
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Quite honestly, I would view your military background as more favorable than a BS. My experience with ex-military sysadmins/operators has been excellent. I would still recommend that you go for a BS degree part-time if you were working for me, but any lack of one would be no problem. You would look far more valuable to an enlightened employer than a new grad. Good luck.
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Like being in the red by $100,000+
School is often a good option but it has to be approached pragmatically. People say 'go to school' like it's the cure-all, the silver bullet, but it isn't. Coming out of an Ivy League with a BA in Art History might make you happier and more fun to be around, but you'd probably have seen a better financial return on the tuition money had you smartly invested it in real estate. On the other hand; get
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There is no reason to go 100k into debt for a college degree, especially for a technical degree.
There are a variety of fine state schools that will train / pedigree you in whatever you want at a fraction of that cost.
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So I wouldn't s
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I can see that private schools may have better students, but that is really debatable. You can find outstanding people anywhere, most state schools have an honors program if you want to hang out with the elite.
The contacts issue may be valid though. Mega-rich people send kids to private schools, so your chances of meeting the offspring of powerful people should increase at a private school. In my experience, techy people don't always get out and socialize so much, so this advantage is lost on engineering
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Also, when you're in college, you get offered more professional "stepping-stone" jobs. You'll find many opportunities for work in your field when you're in college. When you're working at McDonalds, it's hard to network (in the social sense) with other geeks. Other local geek friends == other people that might be able to hook
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They are very different, but neither is waste of time if you are doing what you studied - or anything close to it.
My past, present and future employers are more interested in years of experience and skills. They don't particularly care about my degree.
And yet, they wouldn't be talking to you if you didn't have it...
JON
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Whilst at university you can also further investigate your options and maybe end up choosing a completely alternate path.
The lesson 'sic' is a degree certainly will never hurt and more often than not it will actually help.
CS or CE (Score:5, Insightful)
Or if you don't want a 4-year degree then go the certs route. But understand that by skipping the degree you're skipping a lot of non-computer knowledge that you'll suffer for and limiting your future job prospects. Guys with certs only get no respect. More often than not, its because they don't deserve it.
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The higher end Cisco stuff is quite hard and worth quite a bit to the owner.
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Having said that, I haven't graduated from college, but in my 3 years in school I built up my resume by working at the helpdesk and then as a sys admin. I don't think my career would be where it is today if I hadn't gone to school, even though all I really used were the contacts.
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Math is a tough degree to sell as qualfying you for a network engineering job. Don't get me wrong: its a fine degree. But its not an applied science and its not engineering. A BS in Math is generally a prelude to an MS in Math, not a career. The MS or PhD in Math then leads to all sorts of interesting careers in analysis.
Also, in all fairness it depends on where you want to get a job. Small compan
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And for the record, I've taught plenty of MS certification courses... and honestly, the ones that actually had brains figured out they are best with that money still in their pocket.
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Sure the tests are super-pedantic asking you questions that few real-world developers even have to know the answers to thanks to intellisense and online documentation, but it fills in a lot of gaps that you are bound to have
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Which i
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Come to the financial industry. Lots of people have certs; no one cares. People I know who have certs generally got them before they work where I am or just because they wanted to. Plenty of people with EE, MechE, CS, and Math degrees, however.
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Cisco Academy [netacad.net]. Do an advanced search for 4 year institution. Or, I can point you to where I went, [uwstout.edu] a 4 year degree in essentially, network engineering (name changed since I graduated). Or you could google it. [google.com] 1.2 million hits...not bad. My company employs hundreds of network engineers. How have you not heard of us? The Internet didn't configure itself!
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Certified Toaster Repairman (Score:2)
Of course not. They can, however, be measured by your attitudes toward that piece of paper.
What you choose to tell me on your resume tells me a lot about what I can expect if I hire you. I once had a Senior Network Engineer applicant with a list of about a dozen certs including Kentrox CSU/DSU configuration. Of all the things he could have told me about himself, that made the cut. For those not in the know, CSU/DSUs are trivial
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A couple years ago I completed such a free course in operating a particular network management package. It was a pretty useless course telling me nothing that I couldn't figure out for myself, but my employer wanted me to take it. You won't find it on my resume because its not important.
By putting something on your resume, you're declaring: This is an important factor in your decision to
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If you're a hardware guy and sure of it, CE will give you a better grounding in both engineering in general and digital hardware design in particular. If you want to build robots and routers, go CE. As a CS grad, I only had one course in digital electronics. There are a lot of physical devices I'd like to be able to build but I just don't know where to start.
The price you pay for CE is missed coursework in things like user interfaces and artificial intelligence. If computing research
Go to real school (Score:2)
If you know someone and you know your stuff sometimes you can skip that and go straight to work, and once you have 5 years of experiance under your belt that schooling doesn't matter quite as
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I agree with this 100%. These days, the technical area that requires someone new gives their requirements to their HR division, who in turn place the ads do the filtering etc. Now, it's easy to say "Comp Sci degree or equivalent experience", but for the HR people to look at all your certs and work out your experience, th
I'm 10 years into a career..... (Score:5, Informative)
Once you get your degree (yup, go to college or some other form of post-high school training) then get your foot in the door somewhere doing something supporting the end devices first. It may seem like menial work, but you'll thank me for it 5 years from now....
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GEt a network admin associates (Score:2, Informative)
Please contact me directly (Score:4, Informative)
I know the local market very well.
My email address is published.
Berny
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I am not going to tell this person what to do, I can only relate what I have done and what others have done. I have worked in the market which he / she is in right now. I have good friends who are managers in large organisations and I have literally hundreds of contacts in that area in the place that he / she is going to work. However, I am not willing to discuss the ins and outs of my career who I have worked for and what's happening in a public forum.
He / She can take what they want a
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Hear hear. The problem with giving/getting advice like this is that everyone has different end goals in mind. Some people want to settle down with a family and a steady job. Some people will be single into their 50's and want to travel while they work. Other people just want to get out of the rat race by the time they're 30.
To tell somebody they 'have to go to school' to be succesful when that person's goal is to retire as a l
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I can only relay what I have done and what it has meant for me, as well as what other people have done and put him
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Considering that the person who posed the question and the responder are both Australian this seems logical.
Get the degree (Score:5, Insightful)
Certificates will help, but not too much. The A+ don't mean squat. A CCNA/CCIE and CISSP are the good ones to have.
Remember, the people that invented things like TCP/IP, Sun, Cisco and Microsoft all met at University. While some dropped out, they still attended and made contacts there. They don't call it BSD for nothing.
Charles
Network Integration Engineer
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When you get bored of bashing configs into Junipers, solving ISIS convergence problems, faffing about with stupid peers who break your peering sessions and dealing with idiots who know little then you'll need the degree to look good and do something mo
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Not the kind of expert knowledge that is needed for a specific line of work.
You'd have to have learned it all by yourself before or during your studies.
If you haven't, you'd probably need to get those CCNA, etc, regardless in order to gain the required skill.
Even if y
Become an electrician (Score:5, Informative)
Get an electrician's license instead. You're still stringing wires, but the pay is better and it's often unionized.
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Your first mistake. CIS/MIS degrees pretty much translate to, "I washed out of Computer Science but still wanted a technology degree".
As a 17 year Networking veteran... (Score:2)
As a 17 year troll... (Score:2)
My advice to the OP is to keep your skill set broad. A CS degree is not a panacea, but it helps in this regard.
Networking is network-centric, not OS (Score:2)
Find 2 people .. (Score:3, Insightful)
First, GET THE DEGREE. The option that CANT hurt. (Score:2)
Fuck that, and get a degree, young man.
If you want to have ALL options open and available to you, and not have to search for companies who dont care to know that you can demonstrate your ability to stick to something, succeed and overcome adversity. (like running out of money and ramen two
Re:First, GET THE DEGREE. The option that CANT hur (Score:2)
Re:First, GET THE DEGREE. The option that CANT hur (Score:4, Funny)
Odds are, you just suck.
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Look, and I mean this, if you spent 120K on a History Masters, and dont want a teaching job, not only do you suck, you swallow.
I mean, come on!
A little self-awareness maybe? "Hmmm, this History degree is getting really expensive; I wonder what I will be able to do with it when I am done, since I dont like to write or teach? Hmmm...."
Yep, that takes suckage to a higher level.
THAT is the person who goes to one of those MCSE b
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Listen carefully. Do I have your attention? Okay, here we go.....
Being stupid can hurt.
If you go to college, you can find out just how stupid you are, REALLY FAST.
Then you can quit, long before spending a lot of money, and get an MCSE and profit!
Now, was that so hard?
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Either way can work (Score:2)
I know several people who have been successful in the field and some went the cert route and others got their degree. The most important part of succeeding in any career is to stay active in searching for opportunities and then taking them. Generally, the best way to find those opportunities is networking - people, not computers.
If you think you might want to work at a large corporation, you might need the degree to make it past the HR obstacle. In addition, with just the certs you might be lower on
Community college (Score:2)
2) Get computer engineer degree at college
3) Meanwhile get your certificates (optional but helpful)
4) Get contacts while in college
First, you can get a decent job with just your certs, but you will have an easier job, have more opportunities, or get payed better with a degree. There are always exceptions to the rule but generally this will be true. The degree will provide more opportunities down the line.
I went for "network engineering" (Score:2)
When interviewing for jobs, I could analyze analog and digital circuits, interpret C and assembly code examples, and ans
Those who can do (Score:2)
Those who can't, get certificates.
Go to college and get an internship that will give you lots of hands-on experience. If you want to do networks, expect that as an intern you will start out doing the drudge work of pulling cables and filling in punchdown blocks. But you should also expect (and this should guide you in selecting which company to do your internship with) to eventually get to the point where you are configuring and troubleshooting the routers too. Learn to write (and debug
i'm taking a diploma (Score:2)
The classes focus on a wide variety of things that would really prepare you to step into a position as a junior admin. Besides Cisco (CCNA and CCNP levels) it covers OS from desktop use to server, linux and windows, even spent a couple weeks poking around netwa
My experience FWIW (Score:2)
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I'd recommend school, something I've been slowing attempting to finish, and an internship. Also schools tend to have big systems they let students admin... which is somet
Quick advice (Score:2)
If you go out and do the courses you can get yourself a good job. If you go out and get a degree you can get a good job. Either one will help. Aus is an interesting market like that, you can get some good experience there (To a point) which you just can't get in other countries for different reasons; it's a cultural thing. But there are some jobs that you will go for (And this might not affect you for 10+ years) that people will want a degree for. I also know people who are still wo
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Advice from 10+ years of Network Engineering (Score:2, Interesting)
I am in my early 30's and I am currently the most Senior Network Engineer for one of Canada's top 10 largest Financial Institutions (banks). My experience & advice differs signficantly from most people's apparent armchair advice in this slashdot thread. I seriously question how many of the user comments here are actually from "Network Egineers" as opposed to "Systems Administrators" which are often also titled "Network Administrators" but whose responsibilities are primarily managing server/software
Great ideas... (Score:2)
Cne anyone? (Score:2)
I say "was" because the CNE means absolutely diddly squat today. It's not the same world any more. I should probably not even have it on my resume. All it means is "old fart with old skills." The certs are a treadmill. Whatever is latest and in fashion is the one to tout. MCSE. yeah, OK. Fine. Cisco? Getting warmer. But the point is, what's next year? They
The essence of the whole discussion (Score:2)
This is the essence of the whole discussion distilled into two short sentences and it bears repeating
OK that should do it.
Stew
Get the degree (Score:2)
Certs are there for getting your foot in the door when you don't have any other relevant skills. They show an employer you've got just enough basic knowledge you wont break his network, but not much more.
If you have any chance of getting into Uni, and you really want to work in the Engineering side of networking, go for a real engineering degree.
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Certs are there for getting your foot in the door when you don't have any other relevant skills.
Oh, really? 'Cause I always thought they were for taking a week off work so you can sit in a classroom.
Seriously, I think employer-paid certs have some value to keep your skills sharp. But I have to agree with everyone else here: you can get certs now that will have some value in the marketplace for maybe 5 years. Then you'll have obsolete certs and 5 years experience. Or, you can get a degree now and then
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Just graduating this May (Score:2, Interesting)
Being that
go to school... (Score:3, Interesting)
on a side note: since your from down unda, you should know that you country has a pretty interesting tech history... one of the first ATT system 6 unix non-PDP ports came out of wollongong university.
I am a network engineer (Score:2)
Is network engineering a viable career? (Score:2)
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A look at job postings would have told you "yes" but an educated discussion would have told you it was a dead end.
So frankly, your assertion is crap.
Monster tells you that there are great JOBS to be found... but does not tell you if it is a great career and whether a degree is essential or not (which has become the root of the discussion).
Very nice gripe though....
Stewed
So you're in Melbourne... (Score:2)
Lovely city, that's why I live here
We have a thriving user group community, with a large lug (LUV) [luv.asn.au] and a big wireless networking group [melbournewireless.org.au] among others, get involved and you will get work out of it if you're good (that's how I got the job I'm writing this at).
You need 4 things (Score:2)
2) Certs
3) Knowledge of East Indian languages/dialects
4) A passport
Companies are sending network jobs overseas. Once you're done building the network locally, you'll be out of a job unless (see: Just in time employment) you can move to India.
There is a price you pay for everything. (Score:2)
If you are better, smarter and harder working, this will not be a problem for you. But often, the person with the degree will bump up against a ceiling s/he can't push through that quite frankly an individual with a university degree of the appropria
Get the degree, please, and then take the certs. (Score:2)
Get the degree in any way you can. Certs can wait for later.
You CAN get a well-paying job without a degree, but you should aim higher than that. Don't be so tempted to join the rat race. I don't have a good opinion for people whose only aspiration in life is to get an income, marry, have kids, and then die in oblivion. As a young adult you should aim high, and this means being ambitious and trying to do something meaningful with your life (such as: becoming a scientist or artist, starting an innovativ
Stop thinking about a job (Score:2)
Go to college. Pick a non-tech degree. THEN CHANGE IT. CHANGE IT AGAIN. FART AROUND. Find out what you like. Learn something about literature, math, physics, chemistry (in moderation), the social sciences and the humanitie
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I hear horror stories from a mate who is a systems engineer. He continually fights against some moronic Windows bloke (
No disrespect, but... (Score:2)
No disrespect to the career path you have chosen, but your statement there is exactly why people go to college to begin with. The whole point of college (done correctly) is to teach you those things. Had you gone that route, the jobs you have now are the sorts t
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I haven't looked at a CCNA
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I also made some contacts in the world and was making about $70/hr doing freelance technical writing.
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While it's true I missed out on 4 years of $40k salary, I think the degree more than makes up for it.
Stew
Re: Variable Degree (Score:2)
When I was investigating U. options in 1993, I thought about the durability of knowledge. I ended up going with an Accounting degree, instead of a pure CS degree. Why? At the time the PC landscape felt very unstable. Windows 3.1 and Mac System 7? A Gigabyte was serious storage.
I didn't have the vocabulary at the time, but I caught on that the degree depends upon the years it encompasses. A course period in CS from 1993-1997