This post originally appeared in the Packet Pushers’ Human Infrastructure newsletter. You can sign up for it here. It’s a free weekly collection of essays, links to interesting technical and professional development blogs, IT news, and more.
In June of 2021, I wrote a piece where I detailed how networking professionals in the SMB space should reassess the need for advanced networking skills and perhaps move on to technologies that had more promising futures. My argument largely rested on changes I was seeing at SMB clients first-hand: vendors like Ubiquiti delivered simplified network management at low cost; workloads running on server infrastructure and on-prem PBXs moved to the cloud; technologies like NAT, VPN, and dynamic routing became less relevant because all traffic was destined to Internet-based services.
While all the changes I wrote about have only seemed to accelerate in the intervening years, the networking skills I had spent years cultivating didn’t fade in relevance. On the contrary, fundamental understanding of how the network works and getting traffic to move in predictable ways is in even higher demand.
Allow Skills To Atrophy At Your Own Peril
My prediction went wrong because it turned on one faulty assumption: the past isn’t necessarily prologue. While experience can inform our expectations about the future to great effect, it’s not always obvious how the trends we see will change the IT landscape. To take one example in my 2021 piece, I was correct that site-to-site VPNs would be less important for interconnecting client branch offices as they moved services off-prem. After all, what would they need to connect to between sites?
What I failed to predict was the need for IPsec tunnels to the cloud providers hosting the services that moved off-prem! Every aspect of network theory, configuration, and troubleshooting is still necessary; I’m just pointing the tunnel to a different peer.
If no one can predict the future, then what lesson could one draw from such an example? Namely, that we should choose the skills we maintain carefully. Given my assumptions about the direction technology was moving, I let my CCNP lapse. Without maintaining the cert, some in-depth networking knowledge became fuzzy or disappeared entirely.
Obviously, it’s not possible to keep the tech libraries of our minds fully stocked and maintained – and we’re justified in letting some technologies we’ve learned fall from memory (no offense to frame relay, but I’m thinking specifically of frame relay). Nonetheless, I moved too quickly to look for the next trend without proper assessment of my clients’ plans or needs.
Perhaps a better method for curating our skillsets could come via a diversity of sources. This includes a broad spectrum of blogs, podcasts, and social media. It could also include a wider perspective of time horizons. Rather than just looking to the future, we should keep an eye on the past as well. Have you had to troubleshoot or implement a specific technology in the past year? How about two years? Are certification exam blueprints still requiring study of the technology? Are the exam’s requirements more or less detailed than previous years? What technologies are people in the industry excited about? Can you forsee a use case for those technologies in the coming years?
Change is inevitable in this industry and no single person can keep a view broad enough to anticipate the flux before it happens. But by slowing down our decision-making process and weighing information from a diversity of sources and timeframes, we can better gauge what is—and will be—important.
