Where do I start with networking in IT?

[Catsrules]

2 hours ago, LebowskiBuschemi said:

I've already taken a course based off of the CCNA material. So where do I go from here?

Honestly, at that point I would look at getting a job. After you learn the basics it really depends what you want to target, and what the company that hires you needs. Networking is really a big field you will never learn everything some point you just need to start specializing.

 

If you have never worked in It/Networking, depending on the market and how competitive the networking field is you might need to start at a lower entry level IT position and work you way up.

 

From personal experience schools are a really great place to start out, they have huge networks and are usually pretty open to hiring students. Although my experience is from 10+ years ago so I can't speak for 2022 time frame.

 

You could also look into volunteering at local organizations, for example I support a local Clinic with their small network. That will get you some experence you could put on your qualifications.

 

I also found a home lab really helped me. I learned a lot from it as well as it boasted confidence on changing settings on a network. As it can get pretty stressful when your actually charging setting on a network that is in production (almost always the case ). Very different from a class room setting were there isn't really a consequence if you screw up.

 

My home lab was nice because it was actually a production network, if I screwed it up I could break the internet or other service and I would have family members/room mates or myself yelling at me :). So it had consequences if I did something wrong but I wasn't going to get fired or loose a company money or have employees waiting around for the system to come back online so it really wasn't very stressful. 

 

Home Labs are not for everyone but If you do get a home lab I would really recommend making it useful, host a media server or game server. Maybe setup some VLANs make a guess network or try to block your smart TV from sending your private data back to the manufacturer. Doesn't really matter what you do but make it something that if it breaks you got to fix it.

 

Anyways those are some of my thoughts.

[igormp]

3 hours ago, Mondale said:

 

It never hurts to learn Linux but I've found  that the majority of companies I've dealt with mainly use Windows servers with maybe a few Linux sprinkled in. Also, it depends on the company structure too. Some companies have departments separated where network only does networking and System Admins only do servers, etc.

It really depends on what you're working with, and what the company does.

 

As a counterpoint, I've never worked in a company that deals with windows servers at scale, and my current company was over 800 clusters of machines on aws, all of those running linux.

 

Windows is more common when you're dealing with ad-hoc stuff, like managing the IT infrastructure for a local company that needs AD, storage and printing servers, not high-availability stuff with autoscaling and containers.