Last weekend, I managed to talk to a friend of my wife’s, who has been working in KL for a couple of months as a CISCO certificate trainer, such as those CCNA, CCMP etc. She was asking me if she could have any chance to find a job in Sabah, as the dad has been asking her to get back here to work instead of working in Kuala Lumpur, which the living environment is not as safe as in Sabah.
I was frank to her, the Sabah’s IT work enviroment might not appreciate that much for someone to have a CISCO CCNA, CCMP kind of certificates. Especially what she’s been specialized is in training those people to get these certs. As I mentioned to her, I haven’t touched and implemented any CISCO products in any of our major projects recently. The last memory that I’d ever implemented CISCO products was at least 4-5 years back.
Of course, some recent project tenders grabbed by our sister company, do have some requiring the CISCO products. But mainly nowadays fall under to implement WiFi access points and some Catalyst series entry-level switches. Perhaps, all these setup will NOT need you to possess a CISCO CCNA or even higher such as CCMP to get them to work.
Besides, the IT enviroment in Sabah is still pretty weak and not aware at all what so important, and they couldn’t be bothered if a Cisco-certified engineer is to handle or implement their company networking requirement, as long as the person or the company that they’ve assigned the projects to, is able to get it setup and done in good shape!
Refreshing some of my memories, back in about 5 years. The highest-range of Cisco products that I’d ever implemented were setting up some point to point routers for some companies, some Cisco 2500 routers etc, which I believe these products have gone obsolete.
Besides, on switching the highest-end that I has ever touched was the Catalyst 6000+ series, which the project involved using the Catalyst 6000 as the core switch and to link to a couple of the Catalyst 3000+, 2000+ switches. And the physical cables involved were both UTP 100-based-TX and some Fiber 1000-Based SX etc.
As I mentioned, most companies in Sabah are lacking of a solid IT department. Especially on the private sectors, they’re worse. For the government sectors, they have an IT department, but those involved in the IT department are NOT technical enough to appreciate how important to get a switch properly setup, such as to fully utilize VLAN feature to segregate accesses for servers for different departments within the organization.
My experience while setting up the mentioned core switch and the rest of the networking environment, we did propose to the IT department of that organization if they wanted to have VLAN setup properly. And asking them if they could provide the details how they wanted to setup, such as what group of users, and what resources and access privileges that we’d need to work out etc. But they seemed to have gone blur with what we’d told them. And they couldn’t be bothered for such a complex setup. Especially explaining about how important and useful VLAN, and those technical jargons such as VLAN tagging etc, the IT administrators of the organization have completely gone blur. An they finally chose NOT to have VLAN setup. Leaving a core switch Catalyst 6000+ that cost about RM60-80K or more (I can’t remember the price, I guess it was in that range), was being used as a normal switch only.
Besides, nowadays, most IT projects in Sabah involve a total solution, which networking contributes only a very small part. There isn’t anymore big projects that could raise pretty much high budget for implementing only the networking infrastructure. Nowadays, projects with higher-budget mostly involve a total solution, and system integration such as delivering software applications, setting up various servers, and some also include setting up the proper network infra and security. Meaning to say that networking involves only a small part of the total budget, which will probably hardly afford a CCMP-certfied person.
And furthermore, there is a super big gap between the management people, the decision makers, who control the financial of the company and the IT departments. It’s kind of hard for these laymen to understand the IT departments why they need such a complex networking equipment, and this equipment can do only for the network, instead for the entire solution. As instead they have various other China and Taiwan-made products such as Huawei or Dlink or 3Com, which are much cheaper. And I’ve been told these products are all web-enabled now, which you don’t have to deal with complex IOS commands, so you don’t need a certified engineer for that! (This is what in the mind in most IT business men)
Besides, a partner company that we used to deal with, had a guy who got the grand CCIE, but he had flew to Japan for work. As being a CCIP, it’s simply NOT worth staying in Sabah. As there is no big ISP, that you can experience with those Border Gateway stuff!
