Show 14 – Bum Bugling on Cisco Clean Air
Jennifer Huber pulls up a chair at the workbench this week. Her experience and knowledge of in wireless networking is quite awesome. Submarine Cables that carry traffic across the globe have been...
View ArticleShow 30 – HP ExpertOne Certifications
This week we hear from HP on their Network Certification program. Rebekah Harvey, Director of Product Management for HP Global Certification and Learning got in the hot seat and answered our questions...
View ArticleMoving on…What Should I Do Next?
This is more an extended question than a post. It is about moving on. A bit of background. In April of 2011, I resigned from my position as a Senior Network Engineer at a regional University. There...
View ArticleWhy Becoming a CCIE Doesn’t Fix Being Inexperienced
One of the challenges future network rock stars face is that they don’t know what they don’t know. This is a cold, unyielding fact. Certifications get a person down the road a good distance, but...
View ArticleOn Originality: More Art Than Science
One of the reasons I don’t hang out much on Facebook or Google Plus is that the information stream is mostly a repeated regurgitation of someone else’s wit or wisdom. Animated GIFs, funny cats, the...
View ArticleIs the Grass Greener… Or Is It Astroturf?
My father worked for one company for most of his career, as did his father. Now though, it seems like that is a story of yesteryear. Recently, several people on my Twitter list have found new jobs. One...
View ArticleNetwork Ninja Quality of Life: Enterprise vs. VAR
Like many of you, I’ve spent the last several years in an enterprise as the friendly neighborhood Network Ninja. And, like many of you, I became acutely aware of the downside to being the enterprise’s...
View ArticleWork-Life Versus Cold Hard Cash
My previous post, “When Your Job Becomes Your Prison” seemed to hit a bit of a nerve with some of you out there, and I am grateful for the comments and sad to see that so many others recognized...
View ArticleShow 90 – Talking Career With Todd Lammle
Trainer, author, and long-time network industry veteran Todd Lammle joins Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro for a chat about the good ol’ days, the days ahead, and how to make it in the networking business....
View ArticleCould We Have Some Estrogen With Our Engineering, Please?
The other day a friend asked me if I thought engineering was a good field for women. She explained that college recruiters were encouraging her daughter, a high school junior, to consider engineering...
View ArticleManaging Your Job Versus Managing Your Career
I’m between jobs right now; I’m not much for downtime so I ended Friday and start the new gig Monday. But the last year has brought me some realizations regarding my career that I thought others might...
View ArticleDropping Down a Gear
As I have written previously, I have started work after many months of long service leave, and evaluating where I am going with my career. I am about a month into a six month contract working at a...
View ArticleThin Slicing a Black Swan: The Search for the Unknown Unknowns
Over the last two weeks I’ve had an ongoing conversation with Derick Winkworth regarding the colossal (and largely unmanageable) amount of data gathered in information security. I even brazenly...
View ArticleAn Alternate Route to a Networking Career
Can I Ask You a Question? As the social networking revolution enables increasing interaction between networkers and networking-wannabes the world ’round through vehicles like the Packet Pushers...
View ArticleAm I Just a Digital Sharecropper?
When Ethan Banks recently announced he was ditching Facebook along with some other unnecessary social media accounts, I was a little concerned. He said it was because he was trying to digitally...
View ArticleWhen IT Is Like Children’s Soccer
When I first starting working in IT more than a decade ago, I noticed an odd phenomenon. At the time, I worked at a major EDU and we had a pretty small group, with no real division between systems,...
View ArticleArguing With Reality
I haven’t posted much lately, because I’ve been caught in the gravitational pull of a “black hole” initiative at my new job. You know what I mean, a project that never seems to finish, sucking in...
View ArticleSecret Sauce or Cargo Cult Science?
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. - Richard Feynman Recently, I was criticized by a vendor’s sale rep after I posted a review from Network World on the performance of various...
View ArticleRecruitment Part 1: Applying for a Job
I’ve recently sat on both sides of the job interview process. Both were successful, so in the following two posts, I’ll record how I approached each of them. I am not an expert; these are just my own...
View ArticleRecruitment Part 2: Advertising a Job
In this second post of my series, I’ll record my thoughts on recruiting. (You might also like to read Recruitment Part 1: Applying For A Job.) The Job Specification Think about the job that needs...
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