I've been getting a emails from contracting firms looking for what they call either a "Network Engineer" or "Network Adminstrator" but when you look at the job description they send you it talks about how they are looking for someone with experiance with Exchange, Active Directory, VMWare, etc...

To me I would think that those skill sets would fall under a Sys Admin or Sys Engineer am I right in saying that?

not necessarily, all depends on how the company gives people titles
for the most part, these 4 are interchangeable.
usually a 'sys' person in UNIX knowledgeable
the 'net' person is MS knowledgeable
you need to judge by the job description

_________________
"If you're good at anticipating the human mind. It leaves nothing to chance."
-Jigsaw

Haha, welcome to the world of people hiring for jobs they know nothing about. Not that the job title is incorrect but that it is ambiguous.

It's ever changing but from what I've seen "Net admin" has become a work to describe a jack of trades types you see at smaller to mid sized companies while "Network engineer" implies a network specialist.

Just what I observed.

Titles are bullshit.

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http://blog.alwaysthenetwork.com

I was at an event one time where the speaker said something to the extent of "You determine whether you are an Engineer or an Administrator by the amount of repetition in your daily tasks"

This is so true.


We have on of Application Engineers that also does a fair amount of dealing with the core switches and firewalls

Agree with Vito (of course). I've known "Analysts" who knew more and had better skills than "Architects".

Ha! I had the same WTF moment back in 08 when I lost my job. I did job search filters on the key word network Engineer/Administrator. Then when I started getting all sorts of alerts for Exchange admins, windows admins and even help desk positions I started to realize no one really uses these titles consistently.

Even worse in larger companies were specific departments and teams are set with specific titles no matter what they do it just become useless.

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http://blog.movingonesandzeros.net/

If you're job searching, you're better off using keywords that describe what you want to do or the systems you want to work on. Seems like companies will use attractive titles to sucker people in.

Keyword = Cisco
always worked for me.

_________________
"If you're good at anticipating the human mind. It leaves nothing to chance."
-Jigsaw

Thanks for bring this up, that was going to be my next question. I have job agents in Monster and Careerbuilder that are setup to scan the market for these two words. I guess I need to adjust them, maybe to what ristau5741 suggested.

if you want a job as a cisco network engineer and cisco ain't in the job description,
best bet is that you probably don't want the job.

_________________
"If you're good at anticipating the human mind. It leaves nothing to chance."
-Jigsaw