Sorry, Network Jobs Are Changing

There’s a lot of angst in the networking community about programming, SDN, automation, and what it means for networking careers. Plenty of people will tell you don’t worry about it, focus on the fundamentals, there’s plenty of work, you will be fine.

There is some truth in that. There are still lots of jobs in networking. People with solid skillsets should have no problem finding a good job.

But.

Don’t fool yourself. Things are changing.

I’ve seen some research from Gartner that indicates that organisations have been steadily decreasing their Network Operations teams over the last five years. They have also been reducing their Data Networks spend. (Sadly I don’t have publication rights for this research, so you’ll just have to take my word for it).

This is going to put pressure on networking engineers. Your role will be forced to change, if for no other reason than that you are going to have less budget, and fewer people to do the work.

So you’d better think about what that means for how your role might change.

Do you need to change jobs today? No. You don’t have to outrun the lion’ - but you do want to make sure you can outrun the other guy. If the boss wants to decrease headcount further, who’s going to get picked?