Worth mentioning that engineers often build proprietary solutions with proprietary tools and methods. So, while there are a lot of solutions that can be licensed and modified for a use case, the guy or gal building, say, Cisco's WebEx platform can't transfer their skills as readily as the guy or gal deploying, securing and maintaining it within a company.

So much of your work has insane barriers to entry, even for internships, that I'm surprised your roles don't come with one or two assistants to manage the mundane business of scheduling meetings, filtering emails, and planning deadlines around out of office time.

I got my BS in Cybersecurity, and after a few interviews, I nope-d out of IT as a whole. They'd post preferred certs on the job description (like CCNA) only to ask why I wasn't a CCNP during the first or second interview. Or they'd debate whether some other candidate with a CompTIA cert was better prepared for the $15/hr. internship. And I'm nowhere near the specialization of most engineers.

Awesome, awesome work, but it takes a ton of grit to get your foot in the door, and even more grit to switch jobs.