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Any job search begins with a resume. The main goal at this stage is to use it to give your future manager complete information about yourself—as fully as possible, yet clearly and concisely.

The most important thing at this stage is not to fall into the trap of writing "What I WAS DOING." Instead, write "What I ACCOMPLISHED."

Bad Example:

Configuring Cisco switches

Regardless of the scale of your organization or the hardware you use, glitches happen. Sometimes network access drops, a system crashes, or something else goes wrong. Naturally, when a problem is detected, the responsible staff takes every possible measure to restore functionality as quickly as possible.

After restoration, an analysis of the incident’s causes is conducted, and measures are developed to prevent similar situations in the future. All of this can be described as the "Incident Management Process."

Typically, companies use one of the following approaches to incident response:

In the event of any problems or outages, everyone turns to a specific specialist. That person analyzes the situation and resolves the issues.

Monitoring systems are, without a doubt, a useful and critical tool. Everyone recognizes their necessity. However, for most organizations, implementing these systems is fraught with difficulties. It often happens that engineers spend most of their time maintaining the monitoring system itself rather than having it help them solve problems.

Let me share some personal experience that will likely help many people better understand the problem.

So, management concludes that a monitoring system is critically important and assigns the task of implementing it. An engineer, who is already busy with their core duties—like configuring networks—is told to "deploy a monitoring system." Often, no one knows how to do this because it’s their first experience in this area. Let's say the company has a hundred remote branches, and they need to monitor the availability of communication links with each of them. In this situation, they start looking for free solutions, studying available options, and picking one.

Usually, they choose the simplest solution based on checking endpoint availability via ping. After spending significant time installing and configuring it, they expect immediate results. However, the system starts throwing false positives. For example, a remote branch has a primary and a backup link, and the system monitors both. The engineer gets an alert about link issues, checks the availability, and finds that everything is working fine. The monitoring system cried wolf. Despite cases where there are actual problems, most alerts turn out to be false. As a result, instead of helping, the monitoring system simply scatters your focus, leading people to eventually neglect it.

Let’s talk about the most interesting topic: salaries for modern IT specialists. Naturally, the figures mentioned here aren't set in stone, but rather serve as a rough benchmark.

This person has studied the basics of network technologies.
They know what routing is and how switches work.
They have heard of firewalls.
They have a basic understanding of existing IT systems, servers, and virtualization—at the level of "read a couple of articles on Wikipedia or similar resources."

With this background knowledge, zero experience, but plenty of motivation, they arrive at an interview. After successfully passing it, they start working in a position paying $65,000–$71,000  per year.

At this new job, they handle simple, routine tasks: configuring equipment using pre-made templates, investigating why communication links are down, and fulfilling access requests. They handle other mundane duties. At the same time, thanks to constant practice and hands-on work with hardware, they dive much deeper into the theoretical aspects of how technologies work, while also gaining experience interacting with the company's specific network equipment.