Hey everyone. This is my first post so please bear with me if this is terrible.
I’m currently a systems administrator with 3 years of experience. 5 years of total experience if I include the 2 I spent on helpdesk. It’s a pretty wide scoped generalist role. Small team as well so a lot of different tasks day to day. I spend a lot of time in Entra, 365 admin center, Exchange, Teams Admin Center. For VMs we’re using Hyper-V.
I do get some security related tasks. I own vulnerability management and remediation on my team. We’re using Tenable. I’ve done some work remediating findings we got from a vendor during a pen test as well. I’m also usually the first eyes on alerts through defender. I’ve seen Purview, was going to be the guy to set up Sentinel (project got axed), set up some test DLP policies with a vendor during a training session. I realize this isn’t a ton of experience but it feels like small ticks in the right direction.
Kicker is I do some networking too. Mostly provisioning FortiGates for a number of sites come replacement time. I just had an interview for a network engineer position, more pay, small team as well but it sounds like a very siloed network engineer role. However according to the recruiter, they’re super eager to train someone. I’d be on a 2 man Network team.
I guess my question is, if anyone is or has been in my shoes, should I stick where I’m at? Keep with my narrow scope of security related duties and grind an azure cert or two, and get my sec +? Or should I dive into the network engineer position?
I’m trying to plot the best course for myself into this field. Haven’t had any luck when applying to junior security engineer positions, security analyst, or anything of the like. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Edited: Added experience clarity.