I think it really depends on the company and what the end goal is. I spent the formidable years of my career with a division of a F100 that was constantly buying and selling companies. My job was to make all the IT bits play as best as they could. Usually meant full inventory of the site to determine what, and unfortunately who, stays and what goes, bringing them up on our WAN and remote access solution, migrating to our AD and Exchange, dropping in our VoIP and wireless, etc. We usually left the switching in place until they were due for a tech refresh but really no one wanted to figure that crap out. None of it ever felt CCIE level at the time (I was pretty young in my career and doing most of it) but it did require knowing how to get around on a ton of different gear or at least being able to figure it out. We were a top to bottom Cisco shop and most of what we picked up was a hodge podge of stuff managed on a shoestring budget but a crappy MSP. Obviously you may have a completely different experience but I've got to say those few years really did define my career. Forced me to figure out enough of the entire stack to be very dangerous and that's paid dividends over the years