Here's how you can expertly address inquiries about your Internet Services career.

Challenges are opportunities in disguise... I knew early on that having a strong foundation in networking was going to be essential. I'd take extra time out to study and lab on my own, taking an Enterprise mindset to things. That means taking out the "home" router and using something "Enterprise" grade (like a Cisco or Juniper) instead. That also means supporting a more complicated setup (and likely a user base at home) that needs yours solution to work well. When the opportunity arose to teach routing and switching in a Telecom setting, I jumped at it. When we were later tasked with switching vendors (cisco to juniper), it was an opportunity to explore the topics of migration and interoperability. Not challenges, but opportunities...

The best skills are transferable skills. If you understand routing an switching on a cisco device, it's not a huge stretch to understand it on a juniper... If you understand bash scripting and javascript, it's not too difficult to learn python... If you can write a query in a SQL, it matters little whether it's in mySQL, Postgresql or MariaDB... There are core concepts that are transferable to different platforms and applications. Identifying how those work from the ground up gives you a head start no matter what platform and domain you are in.

Sometimes it's the time we put in on our own, that takes years to bear fruit. That is why it is so important to learn on your own, in an area of study that you truly enjoy. You might find that over time, your small project needs more and more work and grows beyond it's original scope... Time flies and you look back at where you were when you started, and you can't believe all the things you learned on your own, because it was enjoyable and fun. One day down the road that experience will pay off and you'll find yourself referencing that old project from a fresh perspective.