In this post, I’ll describe the goals I’ve set for the next couple of years regarding my IT career development. There’s a dual payoff that I receive in working in IT. I earn a decent living and I constantly find opportunities to learn and do new things. I’ll touch on my varied background as well as some of the reasons I’m laying out my particular path the way that I am. If you want to skip the background story, click here.
Roots: Where I came from
The Very Beginning
My very first job when I turned 16 was as a pet store employee. I’d grown up with pets, and a couple of years prior I set up my first freshwater aquarium. While I loved our family cats, I was indescribably intrigued by all things fishy. I was hungry to learn and practice all that I could in the time I worked at there. I learned about water chemistry, fish species compatibility, treatment of fish illnesses, etc. Camaraderie, responsibility, and money aside, I was always learning something new. Even today, I’m experimenting with an indoor pond, and I continue to learn new things on a whole different scale.
First Career Pivot
Fresh out of high school and in my first semester of college, I left the pet store and started at a garden and feed store. Immediately, I was tasked with learning about operating a forklift, a tractor with a loader bucket, and occasionally a small dump truck.
I spent a lot of time outside at this job, which I really enjoyed. It was physically demanding, involving stacking firewood by hand, delivering bags of salt to customer water softeners, and throwing bags of mulch and feed around. Then after about 7 months, I was give the opportunity to take over driving the dump truck full-time. To this day, I LOVE to drive. When I was a child, my favorite toys were Hot-Wheels. A lot of boys like to turn things into guns (I was one of them). But more often than that, anything that I could pretend was a steering wheel was absolute bliss. So being paid to drive? Sign me up!
I ended up staying at this job for seven years, taking a break from college to explore being an adult along the way. Toward the end of my tenure there I enrolled in Police Academy and began training for my next adventure.
Second Career Pivot
Over the course of 1.5 years, I completed Police Academy and tested and interviewed at several local police departments. And after some intense interviews I accepted a full-time position as a patrol officer, rather than volunteer in a reserve capacity. A couple of temptations drew me toward police work. This was post-9/11 America, first responders of all kinds were somewhat in vogue. Additionally, there was, once again, the driving aspect. Finally, I was looking for meaning or some sort of worth outside of myself, and what better way, than to be selfless and willing to risk my life?
My time as an officer was brief. And I didn’t even finish the field training program to become a full-fledge patrol officer before I discovered this was not mean to be.
A Time of Transition
When I left the police department, I was at a low point, as I wasn’t used to, or comfortable with, failure. For the next year-and-a-half I worked a couple of warehouse jobs, finding no purpose or sustaining mental stimulation. It was in the midst of this that I returned to college. Initially I loaded up on business classes, having tired somewhat of computer programming curriculum in my first run of college. The important part was that I took control of my circumstances and I prioritized my education, having received the motivation I needed.
Breaking into IT – The Opportunity
In an ironic twist, it was my police education that opened the door to my first job in IT. My wife happened across a half-page Employment advertisement in the newspaper. Adding to the irony – we seldom read the newspaper. The ad was for a company looking to, among other positions, bring their physical security team in-house. Up to that point, my highest credentials were a State of Ohio Peace Officer Certification, and that was where I felt the most marketable.
Breaking into IT – The Interview
On the day of my interview, I walked in the this opulently appointed office building in the middle of an idyllic campus, complete with fountains and a lake. Before I’d made it to the receptionist’s desk, imposter syndrome kicked in, in full.
A recruiter met me at the receptionist, and walked me through their welcome area before showing me to a computer to take an evaluation exam. This exam tested personality, and cognitive and logic skills, and results were instantly spit out to the recruiting team in the welcome area.
One of the recruiters took me into another room and informed me that while they were in fact looking to hire for physical security, between my education and my test results, I might be interested in interviewing for a position on a new PC Support team. He sweetened the offer by suggesting that if PC Support didn’t work out, they would still process me for the physical security position, so I agreed.
I was asked if I could stick around while they notified a couple of hiring managers that a candidate was available for an interview. Then I met with each, and left somewhat stunned at the turn of events. Having taken a half-day of work for a “doctor appointment”, I was running late to my current employer. In a it of survival mode, I changed from my interview attire into more warehouse appropriate clothing in the parking lot, before I drove to work.
Breaking into IT – the Offer
After less than a week, I was contacted with a conditional job offer that was a 50% increase from my warehouse job. Of course I had to go through the particulars of a background check and drug test, but that was a formality that wouldn’t stand in my way.
IT Career Development – The Early Years
Over the next 3 years, I worked full-time in IT, and climbed the lower rungs of the IT career ladder. I also finished my Associate’s Degree in Applied Science, specializing in Computer Information Technology.
After all of that rapid success, including a promotion to a supervisory role, I began feeling I was losing my edge. So five years after finishing my Associate’s Degree, I enrolled in a Bachelor’s Degree program at Western Governor’s University.
IT Career Development – Hitting my Stride
Over the next three years, I studied for and earned multiple IT certifications as a part of the degree program. Visit my LinkedIn to see an exhaustive list, but a few key certifications I earned: A+, Network+, Security+, and Linux+. I also took a few Python Development courses that built upon Associate’s Degree education.
More recently, I’ve slowed my cadence on studying for new, more advanced, IT certifications. Over the past several years, I’ve aimed for 1-2 new certifications per year. These have included Puppet Enterprise Professional and Red Hat Certified System Administrator (read about that adventure here). Additionally, I’ve renewed all my CompTIA certifications via CertMaster CE for Security+.
Putting it all Together
Infrastructure
Career development in IT can take many paths. There’s Desktop Support, Data Center and Server Hardware, Operating Systems, Virtualization, Storage, and so much more within infrastructure. I love hardware. I’ve had multiple homelab setups over the years, and built several gaming PC’s. And when I studied for Cisco certification I had a full blown networking lab.
Programming/Development
From the start of my college career, I’ve been immersed in computer programming. I have successfully applied my programming education repeatedly throughout my career. A few examples:
- Authored a Java-based wake-on-lan program to programmatically create and send a magic packet, with a database backend.
- Discovered and fixed a code error in a vendor’s VBScript-based web application
- Co-authored an early Linux/Bash based backup solution
- Co-authored a VBScript-based Windows backup client
- Co-authored a Bash-based Linux backup client
- Developed 3,500 lines of Python code to convert the configuration code base for Puppet Enterprise to a code base for the Ansible Automation Platform.
Automation
In my last two employment roles I have focused heavily on Linux automation in the areas of patching automation and configuration management. As briefly mentioned above, I’ve worked extensively in both Puppet Enterprise and the Ansible Automation Platform.
IT Career Development – Road Map
The convergence of my preferences for and familiarity with infrastructure hardware and operating systems, programming, and automation has led me to where I am today, a Systems Engineering Specialist. My primary responsibility is leading the enginering, adoption, and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I am aided significantly by leveraging products such as Puppet and Ansible for configuration management. Furthermore, where I need to convert thousands of directories and files of code from one platform to another, I’ve been able to approach that programmatically to save time, introduce consistency and stability, and minimize human error.
With this background, I’ve selected the following certification goals for 2025 and 2026:
Red Hat Certified Engineer | 2025
This certification will serve a dual purpose. It is an extension of the Red Hat Certified System Administrator certification, as well as a home base for Ansible best practices.
I will be using Red Hat Learning Subscription and am hoping for Sander van Vugt to release an RHCE book for RHEL 9
Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation | 2025
This certification builds upon RHCE and further establishes best practices for developing and managing Ansible automation,
I will rely primarily on Red Hat Learning Subscription to prepare for this one.
PCEP – Certified Entry-Level Python Programmer | 2025
In concert with my desire to become ever more proficient in Python development – in support of both my primary employment and my freelance efforts – I’ll be learning and adopting best practices.
https://edube.org Python Essentials 1
PCAP – Certified Associate in Python Programming | 2026
This certification is the successor to the Entry-Level cert, and will further solidify my ability to adopt and implement best practices.
https://edube.org Python Essentials 2
Certified Kubernetes Administrator | 2026
I’ve decided it’s time for me to address the gap in my skillset where containerization is concerned. I’m going to start out vendor agnostic and go for this certification.
Sander van Vugt offers a video series for this one.
Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration | 2026
OpenShift is Red Hat’s container orchestration platform (and more) built on top of Kubernetes.
I will leverage Red Hat Learning Subscription to prepare for this.
Conclusion
I’ve come a long way in my IT career development thus far. What I continue to get excited about in tech is that if I ever get bored it’s my own fault. What I’m doing today doesn’t have to define the remainder of my career. I’ve grown from PC support to server hardware support, to operating system administration and engineering, to most recently platform automation. And all along I’ve been able to exercise my programming muscles. With subjects such as AI taking the industry by storm, and future tech such as quantum computing on the horizon, I only hope I can keep up!
What are your IT career development goals? Are you in infrastructure? Application development? What do you like/dislike about working in tech? Do you fear the constant change in tech or do you embrace it? Comment below!
