Let’s talk about how to further your career. Not a new discussion, but one that takes on different nuance as IT continues to evolve. And that evolution is happening at a rapid rate lately, finally sweeping networking along with it as we see orchestrated, automated, unified IT stacks start to take hold in the enterprise.
How do you take your current skill set and evolve it to match the needs of modern IT? Will jobs in your country continue to be outsourced in one form or another? Will the IT world even need infrastructure engineers?
To help us explore these topics is Katherine McNamara. Katherine is a consulting systems engineer and blogs at Network-Node.com. This show was inspired by a couple of her recent posts on why the IT industry needs more skilled engineers, and a helpful list of training resources.
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Best line from this episode, paraphrased:
You don’t have 20 years of experience, you have 1 year of experience 20 times.
As a former engineer who did a lot of certifications, and now runs a professional certification program (not in marketing, btw), I found the discussion of the state of technology certifications and how it relates to the lack of qualified candidates for technology jobs quite interesting. It should be its own podcast all by itself.
This topic is not just about technology, but the entire US workforce and how we prepare people for productive lives in our modern society. Look at resources like workcred.org for an example of the efforts being made in this regard. However, just like I wouldn’t imagine going toe-to-toe with any of the participants concerning current technology, it would benefit from having experts in certification, training, and assessment as well as technology involved. Having gone from “test taker” to “test maker”, I can tell you that being good at the former, has absolutely no bearing on being good at the later.
The page that is returned from the “Internetworking Technology Handbook” link on the list of training resources:
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/obsolete/mixed-technologies/internetworking.html
A sign of the times? 🙂