Mr. Shields is a seasoned senior network engineer and consultant with over 25 years of experience working in numerous enterprise and service provider network environments. As Ashburn Consulting’s Director of State and Local Government and Education (SLED) & Commercial Accounts, Mr. Shields provides management oversight of network engineers supporting these projects and clients, mentors engineers, and provides first-in consulting for new projects and programs. Mr. Shields has worked on network designs and implementations for county governments, federal agencies, service providers, and commercial customers. He is experienced working on all phases of network deployments, including network design, complex integrations within production environments, and continued operational support and troubleshooting. Over the past 15 years, Mr. Shields has worked with several MPLS-based networks supporting L2 and L3VPN technologies, as well as with the latest Cisco data center technologies. Mr. Shields holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from George Mason University and maintains the following active certifications: CCIE, Cisco Certified Specialist – Enterprise Core, PCNSA, NSE 3, and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.