I’m based in the UK and on an apprenticeship programme at work. After completing a general IT technician course at level 3 I’m moving onto a level 4 course. It looks like my choices are going to be devops or network engineering. I know a little about networks but I know nothing about devops. My question is, which is likely to give me more career opportunities?
Devops will have more job openings, network will have a higher salary, especially as you become more senior.
Devops people who don’t know networking and/or general traditional sysadmin work are a crushing pain in the ass for those of us who have to support them though. Networking background will make you better at devops, but not necessarily vice versa.
Becoming a networking expert will also make you an expert in troubleshooting everything else in the IT stack from web servers not turned on to database queries causing high CPU usage. All because when something goes wrong it’s the network fault.