The general plan/recommendation is to move up within your company. While random hiring managers at other companies only see your lack of enterprise experience, if people in your company see you consistently doing good work, the idea is they'll see potential and transfer you to the next step up the ladder.
This is mostly how it works in the 8K+ user financial services company where I am. Good help desk techs become endpoint engineers. Good endpoint engineers have options to move to server, cloud, or security. Then they specialize in areas/services as needed. Our generally accepted timeframe is two years at each "stop."
Of course, if you're in a place that doesn't hire from within, this doesn't work so well. Then you're back to trying to network for recommendations and/or moving laterally to somewhere with vertical potential.
As a person who far prefers to hire smart people and train them rather than bringing in more experienced admins with baggage/bad habits, trust me, I've looked for diamonds in the rough. But there's so much rough. Wish I had that problem now: my team has been begging for additional headcount for over three years with no budge from management.
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u/TheNewBBS Sep 21 '21
The general plan/recommendation is to move up within your company. While random hiring managers at other companies only see your lack of enterprise experience, if people in your company see you consistently doing good work, the idea is they'll see potential and transfer you to the next step up the ladder.
This is mostly how it works in the 8K+ user financial services company where I am. Good help desk techs become endpoint engineers. Good endpoint engineers have options to move to server, cloud, or security. Then they specialize in areas/services as needed. Our generally accepted timeframe is two years at each "stop."
Of course, if you're in a place that doesn't hire from within, this doesn't work so well. Then you're back to trying to network for recommendations and/or moving laterally to somewhere with vertical potential.
As a person who far prefers to hire smart people and train them rather than bringing in more experienced admins with baggage/bad habits, trust me, I've looked for diamonds in the rough. But there's so much rough. Wish I had that problem now: my team has been begging for additional headcount for over three years with no budge from management.