career advice

Be a MacGyver — not a MacGruber

Network pros must feel like they carry the world on their backs. One of my big takeaways from Interop was that with the tide of new applications being delivered across the network, network pros have to work across organizational and technological silos in order to keep things working; that they must stop pointing fingers and saying, “it’s not the network,” and fix the problems to prove their worth. By proving their worth, the network staff gains better access to coveted resources.

Network pros also have to be able to speak the language of business if they want to communicate with company bigwigs. Dr. Jim Metzler, evangelizing this message at Interop, said: “You don’t want to go to the vice president of sales and say, ‘I have MPLS.’ It sounds like a disease. You would not get a second meeting with that person; you have just screamed ‘I am a techie nerd.’”

Maybe this isn’t new or earth-shattering wisdom, but the frequency I heard it repeated got me thinking: Why is it all up to the network pro? Isn’t expecting the network guy to troubleshoot application performance sort of like expecting the highway department to fix your car?

Before you start to complain too much, though, think about MacGruber. If you haven’t seen the recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live, Will Forte plays an alcoholic, neurotic spoof on MacGyver. In the most recent MacGruber sketch with Jonah Hill, MacGruber confronts his assistants about criticizing his abilities and questioning his job performance. He’s so busy worrying about this that he fails to defuse the ticking time bomb, and — boom!

Imagine you’re MacGruber, the ticking timebomb is an application performance problem, and Jonah Hill is an application manager blaming your network for his flawed application. You could get defensive and argue with him over whose fault the bomb is. But look what happens.

Sometimes, if you don’t fix the problem, nobody will.

I asked Craig Hulbert, a senior network engineer at a major health care company in Ohio, why so much responsibility falls on the shoulders of network staff. He answered, “Lowest common denominator,” and explained that calling him is almost always the first step taken when there’s a problem to solve.

I’m not sure whether the network is the lowest common denominator. I would like to think that the smartest people with the most technical know-how are running the network, and when people have a problem that’s where they turn.

As far as I know, they’re not turning to the security team to fix application problems or asking the CEO to bone up on his geek-speak.

> Does your network take the blame for poor application performance? Tell us your story in an email.

Outsourced and automated network skills: Is it the end of the keyboard cowboy?

Aside from Angelina Jolie, the movie Hackers just didn’t have a whole lot of redeeming factors if you took it too seriously: overwrought dialog, an improbable eco-terrorism plot, and CGI “hacking” visualizations to make the most neophyte CCNA blush. It definitely has its cult appeal, though, because it captured the romance of tinkering with complex systems that normal people just don’t understand, whether that’s Zero Cool taking over a television station programming or the local networking guru keeping the server humming along against all odds.

True networking admins just aren’t like other people: They understand how to coax every bit of juice out of hardware, how to manually configure every last detail through the command line, and how, almost magically, to fix problems they don’t even quite understand. And that kind of knowledge didn’t come overnight, but after years of training and just plain practical experience.

Those skills, long prerequisite to successful IT, might soon be obsolete.

So says Rob Whiteley of Forrester. Command-line mastery is on its way out in the near future. “It’s pretty much being outsourced,” he said. “If you don’t outsource it, you can probably find a tool to automate it for you.” Instead, Rob said, IT shops need professionals who can digest higher-level views of security, network management and network architecture. Unfortunately, Rob said, the colleges and certification programs are still living in a command-line world and are only slowly catching up.

Don’t trust an analyst’s word? I also spoke with Steven Ostrowski, spokesperson for the Computing Technology Industry Association. In our interview, which I’ll write about more next week on SearchNetworking, he said technical skills alone were no longer cutting it.

“There are jobs out there for the people who have a combination of technical skills, business skills and communication skills,” he said. “But the tech guys have to understand what the considerations are.”

That being said, just because things are changing doesn’t mean everyone agrees IT is dead. As 5- and 10-year-old technologies are now being standardized, outsourced, or automated, the creation of new IT demands hasn’t ceased: VoIP, video, and NAC are just the beginning, and the pace of innovation isn’t about to dry up. IT professionals will always have to be there to determine which technology can deliver real enterprise benefit, and how it can best achieve that benefit. As long as there is technological innovation, there will be IT … even if they’re not the roguish keyboard cowboys they used to be.

Cisco to add a job-matching service

Cisco certifications recently reached 1 million but long-time rumors of the program starting an official job matching service may be actualized this summer.

In an interview conducted by news writer Michael Morisy, Fred Weiller, director of switching product and solutions marketing at Cisco intimated that “they were working on an official Cisco career marketplace to match certified professionals with jobs.”

With all the talk of having to survive a recession in the IT industry (whether or not we’re actually in one is entirely debatable), extra job-support programs may be the perfect answer.

If you look at some of Cisco’s existing sites, however, it seems they’ve already provided quite the gamut of career-excelling resources: Take, for example, Cisco’s career resources page or their Career Connection center which “seeks to link Networking Academy students and graduates with employers who are looking for job-ready IT and Networking candidates.” Cisco’s Digital Divide Best Practices Web page features job search strategies for entry-level students and more.

What might separate these resources from Cisco’s “official” job matching service? Should we expect to see a Dice or Monster-like site from Cisco? And what should people do in the interim (besides visit the previously mentioned sites)?

We see the questions in our SearchNetworking.com editor’s inbox every other day: Is it better to get a certification or to get experience? Should I get educated or certified? Even though certification, education and experience all work toward the same goals — doing one seems to prevent you from performing the other; When future IT pros make their way through a higher education program, the requirements of the learning institution can supersede certification goals — and when current IT pros aspire to earn certifications or degrees, many times their employment obligations sap valuable time and energy away from pursuing further education.

To combine all three facets in your job-seeking path, IT training and certification expert Ed Tittel mentions this: “The best thing you can do for yourself … is to get into a degree plan where you also earn certifications on your way to an AA or BA in an IT discipline of some kind. Many programs include such options or requirements nowadays, and will give you the best of both worlds.”

Now if those certifications you decide to go into are of the Cisco persuasion, you can kill three birds with one stone, as they might help you find the job opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

Don’t let your job get shipped away

Despite the occasional peril of lost connectivity, it’s a fact of modern business that more and more services are being sent overseas. Once primarily for application development and call centers, outsourcers are enroaching increasingly closer and closer to the heart of businesses. Over on IT Knowledge Exchange, several SMB-types discussed outsourcing their entire IT departments.

Fortunately, there are some things savvy networking pros can do to make themselves “strategic assets” (HR speak for “not outsourcable”) rather than “commodity services” (that’s a bad thing). We’ve got a more in-depth look up at SearchNetworking, but here are some tips boiled down from my conversations with IT veterans, analysts, and even an outsourcing company’s HR specialist:

• Those with purchasing power are less likely to be cut. If you’re buying something, it’s a good sign you understand the business needs on a higher level, and that you know how to …
• Think strategically. If what you’re absolutely great at is properly configuring routers or securing a VPN, guess what? So are a lot of other people, and often times they can do it halfway around the world just as easily. What they can’t do is look around your business and suggest ways to cut down on communication problems between sales and the warehouse.
• If you specialize, make sure your field is not going away anytime soon, and define your specialization broadly enough to be flexible in case the winds change. That means taking a hard look at the theory behind, for example, VoIP management techniques rather than simply learning how to install and maintain one brand of bandwidth management appliances.
• Don’t rely on certifications alone. As the HR specialist told us, it’s just as easy to get certified in India as it is in the States, and labor is still cheaper there.
• Don’t forget soft skills. Part of being an effective networking strategist means working with — and learning from — others outside of your domain. Leadership and communications courses can help you not only freshen up your resume, but also work more effectively outside of IT.

There’s also some really great advice in in the ITKE forums, and if you’ve got a question about what to do with your own career, you might try asking there: Generally the members are more than willing to help out, and many of SearchNetworking’s resident expert tipsters are active participants. Some career-oriented posts I came across:

• How do I become an ICT professional?
• How do I get into IT with my administrative background?
• Certification in Business and Personal communications
• Advice on advancing a networking career