On Saturday 28 November 2009 09:39:14 pm Daniel Bwente wrote: > I do agree from the HR / Employer perspective there are > many variables to consider as you rightly put it, how > about from the employee / Young Sister side, what would > you have them put emphasis on as they pursue and build a > career in ICT, What career guidance should we bequeath > them?
My recommendation would be to continue reading as you work. I cannot explicitly prefer one over the other. They compliment each other greatly. For instance, experience might teach a network engineer to configure OSPF or IS-IS without issue assuming default Ethernet interface configurations on routers. However, what the engineer might not know is that when he tries to fix an MTU problem for a customer on a transit core interface (by changing the physical interface MTU from the Ethernet default of 1,500 bytes to, say, 1,400 bytes), OSPF breaks. What the engineer doesn't know is what experience will teach him, painfully. Had he read about the rules that govern adjacency formation of link state routing protocols, he'd know that MTU mismatch will lead to failure of the same. Had he taken the time to read up and study on this, he wouldn't have had to learn it the hard way (and very likely, avoid risking his job or his company's service reputation). As you can see from the above, I'm not merely saying certification is the best form of "reading". Even after certification, you need to maintain your edge, because certification renewals only occur once every 2 - 3 years, but a lot can happen in the Networking industry within that span of time (and I can't take, for an excuse, "I didn't cover that during my certification and it only appeared in the renewal 3 years later"). There are tons of reading sources online; either from IETF documents, vendor publications, books, mailing lists, blogs, workshops, conferences, e.t.c. It's a wealth of information and knowledge. Mix that with practical application, and you're good to go. That would be my recommendation to an up & coming network or systems engineer. Cheers, Mark.
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