I am wondering what kind of career moves I have available to me because I am over the bullshit of desktop support. I have been brushing up on my Linux skills, learning docker, and doing a whole bunch of networking-related things. At this point, I am 46 years old. Would it benefit me to go back to school to learn a skill to help me advance beyond this role? I just don’t know what to do. There are many options, none of them truly low cost and all of them involving a significant amount of risk.
I get that there is no avoiding risk when making a career change so late in life. I was looking at training for Java or Oracle and it isn’t cheap. Maybe given my experience I could teach A+ or Network+? I don’t know. I’ll welcome any ideas right now.
DevOps is fun and you’ll learn a lot in a short amount of time. You will have to learn a bunch of stuff about automation, how different technologies are built and deployed, source control, etc. It’s a steep learning curve but awesome if you’re up to the challenge. It is never boring. I’ve been working on DevOps processes since before it was called DevOps. I’ve always been happy to be in this sector. Keep in mind that there is no set definition for DevOps. Some purists will argue what I do, setting up the tools and automation then let the devs do their thing, is not DevOps. They might believe that DevOps means developers set everything up and support everything. Of course, that doesn’t scale. Other companies just rebrand build engineers as DevOps. That’s about the most boring thing I can think of, besides QA. :-) Good luck!