Keep your skills updated. Find the time to do it. After being laid off by Cisco, I struggled to land a similar role. I didn't realize how outdated my skills were until I started interviewing. At Cisco, I was in a centralized organization with outdated tools, and favoritism kept the best projects in the same hands. Ultimately, my past achievements meant little, and I had to pivot and take a job in a completely different field. Staying current with your skills is essential.
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The culture of favoritism does not help grow skills nor knowledge. You become too comfortable leading with entitlement. Out there it is a real battle and they only want the best...
Expert level and knowing a bunch of stuff about OSPF, BGP, wireless, spanning tree and QoS no longer cuts it. It ain't 2002 anymore. Those skills land you a low-middle dead-end tech role these days isolated to networks team who are seen as a bunch of nerds by Cx suite. Someone who knows APIs, javascript and python will win hands-down any job interview. Translation: a college grad will whip the a-s off any Cisco politician PE these days in an outside interview.
Since so many Cisco products were acquisitions, most employees have little work to do outside of maintenance and small feature additions...the real dev work was done prior to the acquire.
So we end up doing low-grade work that slowly dulls our wits and erodes our skills.
Not that other companies are much different; most devs will now go their entire career without seeing a single greenfield project.
So we end up in a weird state of millions of devs but very few who can write something from scratch.
tl;dr: best bet to keep your skills sharp is a side project
It is good to join team where you can further sell your skills later, even it takes a pay cut.