Only now that I've seriously started looking for a new job do I realize how much time I actually wasted here. In the meantime my skills have significantly atrophied and that makes it even more difficult to find a new job in an already bad job market. I am aware that the only solution is to try to update my skills as much as possible, but that is not easy to achieve in a short time and I am trying to get out of here ASAP. Any advice?
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Spend more time managing your career. Hone your instincts and update your skills all along the way. Nobody else will do it for you.
Take advantage of the perks while you have them. LinkedIn Learning, and other internal training services. Grab Take1 ASAP as soon as it opens. Search now to find something in it, or add stuff now.
Not sure what your skill area is, but if cloudy/tech, I say get on A Cloud Guru and pump hours per week into it. Embrace the unfamiliarity and dive in. Right now it's one of the few things under your control.
The good news is that even if you're rusty, if you learned this virtualization stuff in the past then you're still very capable of learning. May seem easy in hindsight but also came with a steep curve IMO.
I was in the same boat and the learning curve of k8s/terraform/git/jenkins/public cloud, etc was insanely intimidating because the why of doing all these things gets intertwined and there's all these co-dependencies along the way and instantly felt 4-5 years behind the curve.
But once the lightbulb starts clicking, it's a real good feeling to chase. Your confidence will quickly come back and you'll feel better about outside interviews.
Escape is possible
You answered your own question. Go and upskill. There are no short cuts to learn something new. Book an hour out in the calendar each day / every other day and start reading. I worked in Customer Success and the only way out I see was to learn devops / kubernetes and so on and left. Thinking about VMware tech now feels dated to me. I couldn’t imagine going back designing vRA / vCD / vSphere and whatnot. I cannot see how these techs survive the next 5-10 years.
Anyway. Only you decide your future and career so it’s up to you to decide what to do. For VMware you are just a number and they don’t care about you.
Network network network. I have been working for 25 yrs and only once did I get a job that I didn't know someone on the inside already.