By chance, I recently stumbled upon a Tech Report carried out by a well-known staffing company. In fact, it was more a salary guide than a tech report. I believe these guides offer valuable insight into the latest trends though.
Despite not being a networking expert, its underlying principles have always caught my attention, specially when I started digging into cloud computing and setting up VPC's, subnets... For me, it was no surprise that Cisco had 3 certifications in the TOP Certifications list. However, when I took a look at the In-Demand skills list, almost nothing was related to networking except for Cloud Computing. Among the top skills one could find programming languages, cloud computing, IA, Linux...
I soon thought to myself that the reason behind this was the network automation that is going on nowadays. As a matter of fact, more and more network engineers are starting to incorporate Python as one of their skills. Now, you must be wondering, is cloud computing the end of traditional networking? Do those most valued certifications such as the CCNP, CCIE... hold any value to find a job in the current market share? I would love to see opinions about this in the comment section. We must take into account that underneath the fancy facade of all cloud providers, there is still a real TCP/IP networking going on. This means that the principles of good networking are not going to go away just because cloud vendors are hosting somebody else's infrastructure. Most top-skills were programming-related, which does not necessarily mean that network engineers will soon disappear. What it says is that software developers are in-demand inside the tech industry, even though most of them are not network infrastructure people and have no clue about what a secure, scalable, elastic and resilient environment looks like.
I have always admired people who go after IT certifications one after the other, specially because they are aware that experience is key in the IT industry. Passing an exam is not the same as having the skills to carry out a certain task. Whilst the certification on a resume will be a boost, there are multiple ways to communicate that exact information to a company (include a section on your resume, build a home lab, work on side projects...). For instance, imagine for a second that you failed your CCNA exam. This can be an opportunity to relearn your skills better and you should not lose your motivation because of that. Wouldn't it also be a boost on your resume to share your experience and the process that you went through for preparing for the exam? Just think about it for a second, your new company might even end up paying for your cert if you can show them that you have the skills!
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