By SANDRA GITTLEN

The longevity of skills

Network World, 12/05/01

At our State of the LAN/MAN Town Meeting in Long Beach last week, we had a group of students from a local college in attendance. They were very eager to find out about all the new emerging technologies, however one question a student asked rang sad to me for several reasons. Here's the question:

"I am a student majoring in telecom management. Can you predict how much of the information brought up today will be obsolete by the time I finish school in one and a half years?"

My co-moderator, Network World columnist Kevin Tolly, and I just winced. I was sad that she was so unsure that she had to ask the question and I was sad for what would be the answer. When we addressed her question during the session, we jokingly said that she should probably leave right now. What we meant is that probably, by the time she leaves school and enters the job world, things will have changed dramatically. We might not be talking about simply Gigabit Ethernet and 10G Ethernet. After all, how widespread was the talk of 10G Ethernet or metropolitan-area networks a year and a half ago?

Tolly added that "hopefully the fundamentals will be the same." For instance, he "grew up" in the mainframe era. Now, that expertise is helping him with a lot of the new technology that's evolving back to mainframe principles. An attendee commented that he worked on proprietary voice systems a long time ago and that experience is helping him migrate his company's network toward convergence.

Tolly said, as a rule, almost everything old is new again. So, where does that leave our student? One of her classmates said he worried about the same thing. He says that he is learning about all these technologies in theory and minimal practice, but is concerned that by the time he emerges, he will be behind the curve.

Several attendees and I discussed at the break that the economic slowdown is, in a way, a plus for students. Companies are slowing down their implementation curves and focusing more on what they already have installed in their networks. Perhaps that means that today's students have a chance of keeping their skills cutting edge longer.

I think students should concentrate on learning the concepts because if they grasp those, then they will be able to learn new things more quickly and not get bogged down in specific product details. (Shameless plug: And, hey, one-day seminars aren't such a bad way to supplement your long-term learning.)

For a list of our upcoming seminars:
http://www.networkworld.com/events.htm

For the dates and locations of the free State of the LAN/MAN Town Meetings:
http://www.networkworld.com/seminars/lanman/default.htm

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Gittlen is Events Editor at Network World.
You can e-mail her at sgittlen@nww.com.