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Field Technician for corporate solutions

Gerson Acevedo
Level 1
Level 1

So I landed this job in a medium company. I had a few interviews and a few exams. They wanted a ccna because they have a partnership with Dell , So basically I going to support the Switching part. I am kinda worry because. I have experience as a Network Administrator with my own equipment for 50 people in my previous job. But now I going to work with several companies designing solutions with other coworkers who have experience in servers, virtualization , San etc.

I am studying CCNP material in the switching part to increase my skills a little bit.

So do you have any advice for a newbie guy like me?

thank you

3 Replies 3

petenixon
Level 3
Level 3

I would recommend going through the CCNA guide at least once! The CCNP switching book is good (i'm reading it as we speak), but it does miss a lot of the fundamentals that are covered in the CCNA syllabus.

johnlloyd_13
Level 9
Level 9

hi,

IMHO, your CCNP won't be enough to survive in the real world. my advice is not technical but rather just my 2 cents (also came from personal experience).

i would buy lunch or a coffee to a very knowledgeable colleague and he will give you his unsolicited advise or guide you if he's willing. who knows he might ended up mentoring you.

good luck!

Jon Marshall
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

Well unless you misled them in the interview about your current skills then they obviously think you can do the job so have some confidence in yourself.

I have been in your position a number of times where I started a job knowing very little about what was involved.

Be a self starter. If you need to know about something then go out and find out about it, don't wait to be told how to do it and certainly don't wait for them to find you a course on it. It's going to be a lot of work and you have to do a lot of it in your free time.

Apart from obviously getting on well with your team the main skill is to show them that although you may not know what you need to know now, it won't be long before you do.

Cisco has a ton of documents on just about everything, there are forums like these and there are books on just about any subject you can name.

By all means study CCNP but bear in mind certifications like that are based around concepts and they won't tell you which switch can do what, how to spec up a kit list etc. For that just go to the Cisco site and these forums.

Make sure you understand the basics and I mean really understand. With that you can tackle pretty much anything.

Finally if it was me and I knew that I needed to understand virtualisation etc. I would already be on Amazon finding books to give me a good high level understanding of it. You don't need to understand servers, storage as well as the people specialising in them so don't get distracted but the more you understand the better you get at your own job.

Read, read and keep reading.

And yes, for the first six months or so you will probably be doing as much work in your free time as you are in your job :-)

Just my opinions, others may differ.

Jon

Review Cisco Networking products for a $25 gift card