I left my previous job with a large municipality about a year and a half ago after burning out from supporting public safety systems and being on call. Having a newborn daughter made the timing of the break work out, and I'm now preparing to start at a smaller municipality in about a month.
I recently realized how rusty some of my day-to-day skills have become when I had trouble remembering the name of Windows Event Viewer, even though I knew where the logs were located. The new position is officially an endpoint engineer role, but the interview made it clear that I'll be handling a wide range of responsibilities. I have a CCNA, although I haven't worked with Cisco equipment in more than five years. They also appear to be transitioning from traditional MDT imaging to Intune provisioning, while my previous organization used SCCM.
What would be the best way to get back up to speed before starting? Should I review specific technologies such as PowerShell, Intune, Entra, Group Policy, networking, or virtualization? I'd also appreciate advice on joining a new organization, especially one that has had significant staff turnover. I want to rebuild my technical confidence while maintaining healthier work and personal boundaries this time.
4 Answers
Use your first week to learn what the role actually includes instead of assuming the job posting tells the whole story. Ask for the team structure, existing documentation, escalation paths, recent incidents, and any after-hours expectations. Since the IT team has experienced a lot of turnover, there may be important institutional knowledge that hasn’t been written down. Treat questions as part of onboarding rather than as evidence that you’re unqualified.
A small home lab would be useful, but keep it manageable. Review PowerShell, build a basic Windows and networking environment, and spend a little time with Intune, Entra, device enrollment, Conditional Access, groups, and Group Policy troubleshooting. It’s also worth refreshing practical details such as local versus domain sign-in syntax, shared drives, Device Manager, CIDR and subnet calculations, static addressing, Azure CLI, and basic virtualization navigation. The frustrating part after time away is often remembering the exact command or menu path, not understanding the underlying concept.
That’s reassuring. I’m mostly worried about having to ask for reminders on simple things, but making a short list of common commands and workflows should help.
Start with the job description and focus on the technologies that are actually mentioned there. You already demonstrated enough knowledge to get through the interview, so this is probably more about getting familiar with names and workflows again than relearning everything from scratch. Forgetting the name of Event Viewer after 18 months away is completely normal, especially when you’ve been using different tools or working mostly through PowerShell.
A lot of tools have GUI names that people barely use in practice. Someone can understand Active Directory deeply and still need a reminder of the exact name of an MMC console they haven’t opened in years.
You may be overestimating how much rust matters. Most of it will come back during the first week or two. Before starting, I’d skim Microsoft’s current Autopilot and Intune enrollment documentation, since your SCCM and MDT experience will transfer conceptually. A couple of evenings in a small lab with Windows, Entra join, Event Viewer, and a switch command line should be enough to get your hands moving again. You don’t need to turn the month before your start date into a second job.
I confirmed during the interview that there isn’t a formal on-call rotation, so I’m mainly trying to understand the informal after-hours expectations around patching, meetings, and urgent issues.
I’m hoping to keep work contained to work hours this time. I’d like to avoid putting work email or chat on my personal phone and shut the work phone down at the end of the day unless there’s a clearly defined emergency process.