Hi all,

I started my IT career in 2012 as a desktop support technician and then NOC support. My career kinda stalled for a while because I wasn't sure what I wanted to specialize in. I eventually went back to school to get a CS degree, thinking I'd become a software engineer. I got a SWE internship where I was doing 50% IT work, 50% dev work. It was what I would call a "DevOps-lite" position. We didn't use Terraform or Chef, but I was trying to move in that direction and automated a great deal of CI/CD operations.

After I graduated, I worked as a systems engineer for a large enterprise and I realized that kind of work just wasn't for me. I didn't like all the meetings, gathering requirements, drafting specifications documents, proposing system designs, etc. I always enjoyed doing the administrative work like managing users, configuring switches/routers, deploying software to servers, performing security audits and threat analysis, patching, etc.

I really want to be able to work remotely. I can read/write code, but it drains me mentally so I'd prefer if it wasn't a major part of my job.

I was laid off due to covid last year, then remained unemployed so I could care for my disabled wife during her pregnancy.

Basically, I need help figuring out my best option to "return" to IT. I feel like I've been away for too long to be a specialist at anything. My Network expired in 2014 and I have no other certifications. I am familiar with the basics of AWS (EC2, S3 and CodePipeline) but nothing in-depth. I am quite comfortable with Linux and know how to get around, but I wouldn't say I have it memorized like the back of my hand either.

I've always been interested in networking and security, so I could see my systems software background aligning with cybersecurity, but there are so many sub-sub-sub-fields of IT & security I have no idea where to start.