I graduated from a tier 2 college in 2020 and joined a third-party team supporting a Tier 1 investment bank as an SRE. I stayed there for about five years, becoming a full-time employee after the first two. I was laid off in May 2025, but I had already been considering a change. Much of my work involved internal tools, so I felt my technical growth had slowed down.
That same month, I accepted a DevOps Engineer - Migration Specialist position. The title and salary were encouraging, but after joining I realized the job was mostly L2 support. I planned to stay for a year, build my skills outside work, and then move on. Instead, the low level of technical challenge caused me to coast, and now I feel rusty and behind.
When I try to study, I often have the strange feeling that I already know the material, but I still do not feel confident applying it. I am not sure whether I genuinely need to relearn everything or whether I am dealing with self-doubt and a lack of recent hands-on practice.
What is a realistic, sustainable way to rebuild my confidence and become job-ready again? I would especially appreciate recommendations for focused courses, microlearning strategies, or small projects that could help me regain production-level DevOps skills without burning myself out.
3 Answers
Do not rely only on long beginner courses. They are designed to explain every concept from the ground up, so a lot of the material will feel familiar while still failing to rebuild your confidence.
A better approach is microlearning: choose one topic, review it in a short session, and immediately use it in a small lab or exercise. This works well for certifications and practical skills such as Kubernetes, AWS, Linux, networking, and infrastructure as code. Repeated short sessions are usually easier to sustain than trying to force a 40-hour video course into evenings and weekends.
Start by taking inventory instead of assuming you need to start over. With roughly five years of SRE experience, you should be thinking at a mid-to-senior level, which means being able to work independently, troubleshoot complicated issues, and explain your decisions. You do not need to know every tool.
Write down the technologies and responsibilities where you are genuinely strong, then identify the gaps that matter for the jobs you want. Think beyond tools too: incident response, communicating with stakeholders, influencing decisions, estimating work, and handling operational tradeoffs all count. Give yourself some grace as well. A lot of this sounds like rust and impostor syndrome rather than a total loss of ability.
Courses were not the biggest help for people I have seen in this situation. A realistic project that is slightly beyond your comfort zone tends to work better. Build something end to end, such as a service deployed through infrastructure as code with CI/CD, monitoring, centralized logs, alerts, backups, and a documented recovery procedure.
Work with someone more experienced if possible, even if it is just pairing for a couple of weeks. Having another person review your design and troubleshooting process can restore confidence much faster than passively watching lessons. You are probably not as far behind as you feel; you mainly need recent evidence that you can still solve real problems.
That makes sense. I dealt with impostor syndrome for a while, but now the bigger issue feels like being rusty and behind. I probably need to separate those two things instead of treating them as one problem.