Hey everyone, day 7 of hunt for devops
The DevOps Career Pathway
So, interesting pathway for devops engineers: https://sdcce.edu/academics/information-technology/index.html
So, as many of you may know DevOps Engineering is not an entry level role.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and break in as someone with little experience through side projects. But the standard pathway is to be a Desktop Technician / IT Operations side for 5 years and try and become a DevOps engineer by evolving from operations to also developing projects as I’ve heard.
The link above shows exactly this where you start as a desktop technician, learning networking with CompTIA A+, and Network+ certificates as a Desktop Technical, then going into Windows SysAdmin, and Linux Server Admin.
Linux systems are super cool, I have spent a lot of time seeing how linux works on Apple silicon with Fedora.
Then goes Cloud Solutions AWS-Associate, then CompTIA Security+, then Cisco Certified Network Associate.
Then CompTIA CySA+ - Cybersecurity Analyst
Web servers and applications DevOps (FINALLY)
Cloud solutions AWS Security or ML specialities
This ties into going into either CyberSecOps or MLOps roles.
This is the general pathway offered at the free college at North City College, although I am uncertain it is a good idea to go into an online course. If you are looking for structured knowledge sure, but when I go into education environments I typically like in person to network, talk with professors (I’ve heard so many people getting jobs from professors, obviously don’t ask for roles, but build rapport).
Pick a Roadmap and Stay Consistent
Also, the learning path that everyone knows now: https://roadmap.sh/devops
I want to emphasize that being a developer is a continuous process of learning. Sometimes things are so fast paced that you will spend 1-2 hrs outside of work learning new concepts to keep up at work.
If you find yourself like me, searching for roles, make sure you study just 1 hour in the role you are looking for each day, and don’t passively learn, but attack the tutorial, why did they code it this way, why not that way, maybe make the project your own, implement a feature, practice recall where you see if you remember concepts in the tutorial like asynchronous operations, and build a mini-project of that concept that may be vital, you will be asked about it in an interview.
There are so many things you need to learn, but it is less overwhelming if you’re consistent in learning.
So if you ever feel lost on what to learn, try looking at this roadmap, choose a technology, and fire up a YouTube video, build projects, heck even write a blog post or writeup on LinkedIn to get people to know you know your stuff.
Maybe try and stick to one stack though, try and find the most popular industry stack based off what companies / sector you want to work for, like FinTech and find out what technologies they use. Heck, there’s even a need for HVAC software if you want to see what stack they use.
Try breaking down a high level term into something you can relate to and understand so that when you’re explaining it in an interview or non-technical people at a role, you can do it easily.
I feel people who can break down complex topics into simple ones is an invaluable skill and the more you learn, the more you develop and learn systems, the better you are at doing exactly that.
What’s Next
Anyways, I started this blog to stay consistent and perhaps help people in a similar situation to me.
The next post, I’ll break down the projects that build fundamentals, the Containerized multi-service app with CI/CD, and Infrastructure-as-Code sandbox on a cloud provider, specifically the VPC and subnets built in my fundamentals project the two-tier VPC