show ccie agent

#CLUS2024 was not just one of the best CLUSs ever, but an emotional carnival of sights and sounds, not the least of which was the Customer appreciation concert featuring Elton John. The turnout of CCIEs seemed high, but the CCIE lounge was disrespectfully small for the original spirit of Networkers. The crowd seemed very upbeat and jovial. After a cancelled CLUS and the pandemic born paranoia visited upon several events, 2024 broke through.

The meetings with my friends from the social, and real life, were what kept me emotional I swear there was a constant tear in my eye. There was the question again over and over, how did the CCIE Agent get started?

?Seems like so long ago I was charged with locating network engineers for employers. Even though I was supervising or managing the CCIEs we hired I needed to recruit as well because there was a lot of lingo HR needed to learn, me too in fact. Blah, blah blah, skimmed across many technologies over the years starting in the US Navy, South China Sea, off the coast of Vietnam and now at this juncture, finding myself amongst the brightest Automation and Artificial Intelligence experts in history, yeah, its fresh copy, but history is hot with fresh off the press' headlines, sweeping away yesterday’s new.

When social media was a baby in the early 2000s, and caught fire quite suddenly, I created my profiles and sought out friends. Outside of the social, CCIEs I learned, had to pay admission to events where they might meet up, some of these fees quite prohibitive. I thought I’d create venues where they could meet each other, I called them CCIE Mixers, without admission fees, training, selling, recruiting, or pressure. Just grabbing a pause in life for a social meetup with other CCIEs. Starting with the North Tower of Tower Bridge London, and then Athens, Cairo, Toronto, Montreal, NYC, and Wilmington. I soon found I enjoyed connecting CCIEs.

What a Trekkie’s dream come true!

Folks showed up, I soon found that people were reading my posts and wanted to connect willingly, seeking me out, sending requests. I was excited and began sharing network venues, events, training, seminars, live online sessions. These free venues and advice for resumes and career direction soon had me connected with over 40k of the CCIE population, the resumes and emails in my DB are over 84k to-date. What I collected were Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper, IBM, MS, Palo Alto, Splunk, Red Hat, SDN, SDA, many vendor cert’d pros, and, most excitedly, the birth of the AI community.

Why community was so important was career opportunities, communicating these and talking to so many on the market about evolving their careers. There are folks, regular callers, I continue to advise that working at Cisco might bring its own challenges, but putting groceries on the table, even if at work it was a full-time job staying there, was its own reward.

The landscape has changed, along with it, the community of experts who have lined up to make other decisive, need I say historic, career changes.

Is AI the new “skinny Jeans?” Is AI going to create its own use cases to improve productivity or will we stay ahead of it and conduct business as usual, just with a new chromium plated tool?

My wife’s a CCIE DC, and she has a tool bag that impresses the network engineers around her. Overhearing the guys asking each other if they brought a wrench, she’s standing there with her DeWalt. All this AI is still supported by hardware, born of the same mother of invention that brought us PING.

The opportunity to create community is still the incentive boosting me along to introduce folks they might not ever get the opportunity to meet face-to-face otherwise. Asking one CCIE if they know another that I’m in the company of, is still a thrill. Especially when times are telling us to huddle closer and change the course of history through information technology again.

Me, I am having so much fun.

?#CCIE #CLUS2024 #DevOps #DevNet #CTNSolutions #CCIEAgent #PassingTheTorch #WomeninTech #CLEU #Cisco #Eortinet #AWS #Amazon