I'm around your age, I'm freelance. Go freelance man. No matter what you apply for, you're going to be at the older end of the candidate list, which makes things difficult no matter what certs you have...the thing with the IT industry is that the older you get the fewer people there are your age...especially in demanding roles like network engineering...I can't pull the same shit at 42 that I could pull off in my 20s...I used to do solid 72 hour runs and just sleep it off over half a day. That shit would kill me now...same with lifting heavy equipment...I'm pretty fit for my age, but its so much easier to pull a muscle and the recovery time is measured in weeks rather than days.

Its not uncommon now for businesses to have an internal team of juniors and hire a freelancer in to assist on more complicated stuff / train them up.

I quite like training young engineers, most of the time you're training boneheads, but once in a while you find an absolute gem...those are the guys you want to put the most effort into because they will move around lots of roles and remember you when they need help in the future.

Ive got about half a dozen such engineers out there and they all feed me work here and there when they need experience on hand, come across some dead tech or just want a second pair of hands on a project that they can rely on.

The tougher ones to train are the ones that come out of academia...but they are the easiest to bring onboard...after they've spent years in the slow trudge of academia and finally see the absolute pace of a genuine pro, their minds explode.

There was one guy who was absolutely mind blown when I tracked down a switching loop. He had been troubleshooting drop outs and slow DHCP for months, reeled off loads of diagnostic shit he'd done, talked about spanning tree packets, duplicate packets, said he had a load of PCAPs etc, but couldnt find the problem. His boss called me in, I wandered around the three rooms that had switches in, pointed at a switch...unplugged two cables and asked where they patched to...discovered one had a desktop switch plugged in with a loop in it. Unplugged the loop. Problem solved. Took about 30 minutes.

Dude was flabbergasted.

There was another time another young engineer called me, he was on shift at a customer of mine and he notices that a load of databases had failed. I was hiking up a mountain on a day off. So I said, I'd get back in touch shortly. I didnt have a laptop with me, just my phone (and it was a shit phone because hiking), it supported tethering so I walked to a nearby Tesco Supermarket and bought a tablet. A Tesco Hudl (they were only £89 at the time, so a cheap way to get SSH in a pinch). Tethered it to my phone and SSH'd to the datacentre to take a look. It was a multiple disk failure that took everything down. Luckily there were hotspare drives available and replica of the data existed, so I switched the databases over to the replicas and set the RAID rebuilding. Called the guy back and explained what I did, then he pointed out that I might need to check something else "some guy in Snowdonia in a tablet just accessed the network, I think we've been breached". I told him it was me and he couldnt wrap his head around the work I'd just done and the fact that I'd some it on a shitty supermarket tablet. This was over a decade ago now, but people still remember!

Both of these guys I ended up training and they're badass in their own right now. Probably exceed me in a lot of ways, but they carry my methodologyies and thought processes!

The best part is when my trainees parachute me in, they don't have to waste time explaining things. They know exactly what I need to know, so I get exactly what I need to solve problems which makes me even faster.