2014 in Review... and 2015 in Preview

Well another year is in the books.  Last year I made a career move and went from being the solo network and voice guy to being part of a large team of network engineers.  The change has been good for me both professionally and personally.

Professionally I'm getting to work with a lot of new technologies due to scope and scale of my new company.  Technologies that I used to scratch my head about why anyone would need them (OTV comes to mind) are now things I use daily.

Personally I can finally take a vacation and not worry about getting called.  It's nice to get completely away from work and not have to worry.  My wife seems to like the change too.  

Twenty fifteen has started off with a bang too as I have finally passed SWITCH, ROUTE, and TSHOOT to earn the CCNP Routing and Switching.  I started this path over four years ago so I ended up having to retake SWITCH this month to get everything within the three year window.  It took two tries, but after missing on the first try this month by 20 points I solidly passed this past Friday.  One thing that I've learned from this is that I need firm deadlines.  Thank you Cisco for changing the CCNP Routing and Switching exams at the end of this month!  

As for the rest of the year, well I'm working on scheduling out the rest of my planned studying and tests so that I have firm dates.  I plan on paying the fee and scheduling the exam right as I start studying to give me motivation.  First on the list is ARCH to complete the CCDP.  After that my manager has me looking at CCNA Voice followed by CCNP Voice as we're planning a 5-6 year conversion from Avaya to Cisco although I may take a slight detour to CCNA Datacenter at some point since Nexus and UCS are fresh in my list of new skills.

So basically I plan to keep learning and growing.  Pretty good goals in my book.  If I ever stop learning, I best be in the ground.