Welcome to episode 125 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 1 of our interview with Tom Hollingsworth in which he shares how his Networking specialty came to be, the journey to a major certification and beyond, and some advice for those looking to get into Networking.
Original Recording Date: 06-01-2021
Topics – Birth of a Specialty, CCIE and Beyond, Advice for Those New to Networking
2:06 – Meet Tom Hollingsworth

* Tom Hollingsworth has been the Tech Field Day event lead for about 8 years as part of his role at Gestalt IT after serving as a Network Engineer for many years.
* Tom’s handle in communities is Networking Nerd due to his deep expertise in Networking. Nick points out that he chose NetworkNerd because it sounded fun.

* Tom gets contacted from time to time because people think he is a master of social networking.

3:34 – Birth of a Specialty

* Tom spent about 6 months on the phone supporting Gateway computers but knew the role would not last.
* He did some contract work and then found a position that was junior level help desk and did a lot of work with schools.

* This allowed Tom to gain a variety experience with different technologies and grow his career at the same time.
* The company was only about 40 people, and the team on which Tom worked had only about 8 people, each with their own specialty. Tom’s specialty was in networking.
* The networking specialty came from the last month on the phones at Gateway (around the 2002 – 2003 time frame when dial up was still popular).

* Listen to Tom describe how he would have to fix AOL for someone.
* In the last month of his time at Gateway he started getting calls about cable modems, which was pretty new to him. He was able to search online for some ideas but would otherwise have to direct the caller to contact their internet service provider.

* At the time, Tom suspected there had to be something to networking at which he needed to take a hard look.

* When ramping for this new role, most of what they did was server based. Tom had to learn some other technologies but noticed there was really a need to fill a networking void.

* A mentor at work walked Tom through Cisco router troubleshooting but said Tom would have to learn it and to go buy a book.
* This was a time when the best way to learn was from technology books.
* Tom knew he had learned quite a bit when Barnes and Noble didn’t have the books he needed any longer.

* He had to buy Routing TCP/IP, Volume 1 by Jeff Doyle and several others.

* In the late 2000s, online forums picked up speed and aligned with Tom’s expertise gains. He was able to jump into a forum and get help on specific problems instead of just reading a book.

* Tom remembers watching War Games and seeing what the...