I have spent the last half of my life essentially working for the same company. A week after I left the military I started working at Sprint as a contractor performing hardware engineering in their ATM/Frame Relay group. After about two months of service, they offered me a full-time position. Since that time, I have held a number of positions and titles most of the time it was my choice but sometimes it was born out of the needs of the company.


During my time with Sprint/Ericsson/T-Mobile I never asked for a promotion and I never applied for a new or better position. Frankly, I never needed to. I was always sought after and promoted in a timely manner. Additionally after accruing 10 years of service with Sprint it did not make sense to me to chase higher salaries with another company.


For clarification purposes, I worked for Sprint until they offloaded their Managed Services work and employees performing those activities to Ericsson. When the Managed Services contract with Ericsson came to an end, I was sent back to Sprint and my service time was bridged. Then with the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, I became part of the Un-carrier machine.


Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, recently I have been caught up in the latest round of layoffs along with some of the most talented telecom professionals I have had the opportunity to work with.


All that being said, I am truly excited about the opportunity to revitalize my career. Although, I have not been able to determine which discipline to conquer. More on this in my next post.


Last thing for this post, I recently realized how much I love to learn.