Hopefully, I am sounding right and speaking something of value to someone.

Companies have or are outsourcing more technical work, in areas as managed IP services such as VoIP and VPNs and are hiring contractors for desktop, helpdesk and security services, and they are preparing to put more applications in Cloud or virtual computing environments.

If people are spending their valuable time and money undergoing training and getting certified as CCNA or CCNP for that matter, are there enough opportunities?

Heaven forbid, they encounter such a time. It’s time lets me have a reality check and see what’s there in the opportunistic market.

Let’s take scenario one, Have all the network specialist jobs have been eliminated? If so why does CISCO, JUNIPER, and others exist with network infrastructure management division; And who handle them?

Bit of bad news, these kinds of roles are going to decrease or let me rephrase these roles definitely going to change: you’re going to see much more automation, more cloud capabilities, and less hands-on administration. After all, every organization wants to use less of the resources and look for driving more business because that’s Business.

Gartner report puts it, “the skill profiles for the new IT will, in many cases, be a hybrid of business and IT skills”.

More good news is that there are not going to be fewer people involved in IT, but they will be involved in IT in different ways, says Howard Elias COO of EMC.

If you are a server, storage or network admin, there may be fewer of those dedicated – can say isolated component – skill sets needed.

While these roles disappear, new jobs will spring up in their place both technical – focused on mastering different services and technologies and business orientated – analyzing huge data stores for valuable insights and matching technologies to meet the needs of business and customers.

Companies would be in great demand for people what we would call them as data centre architects or cloud architects, where you still need to know enough about servers, network, and storage, but you also need to know how they integrate and interact together, and most importantly understand the management and automation that occurs on top of that to deliver that IT as a service.

Did it strike, the current technology and its capabilities are built on the past innovation making them as the source bed. Keep a smile on your face, definitely networking professionals are needed but with more aesthetic ability or technical ability to meet the market demands.

People should undergo training and get themselves certified by CISCO or by the training organization at the least, what we call as course completion certificate. And build your talent and ability in new learning newer technologies like we discussed above which needs a basis of networking and you could shine as a cloud architect, specialist or data scientist or any other fancy designation that companies have to offer.

EMC is backing training and certification schemes for two roles it believes will be core to the future of business IT; cloud architect and data scientist. Cloud architects will deliver virtualization and cloud designs to suit business needs, while data scientists will apply advanced analytics techniques to petabyte-scale databases to identify beneficial business trends.

IT geeks looking to transition into one of these new, more business-orientated roles will also face competition not just from other techies, but from business analysts and graduates who’ve trained to fill these positions.

Business-minded techies and technology-literate business types will be equally eligible for these new posts: “They can come from either side, but they’ve got to be individuals who want to continue lifelong learning and master all of it.

Give yourself kudos if you are undergoing any network specialist training. As an individual, if I do so, I would look for some training company who offer really worth product at a lower cost.

Hope I made some sense and this article was helpful.

After all, change is evident for technology and so does it for us as said in Bhagavadgita.

Originally Post – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reality-check-opportunities-network-professionals-prashanth-narayan?trk=prof-post