* New blogger reacts to statement that routing and switching are easy
After reading an article on IT skills, one of our newest bloggers recently raised the question of whether routing and switching should be considered “easy.”
The Network World community keeps growing, driven in part by our Cisco Subnet and Microsoft Subnet efforts. Recently, Michael Morris started blogging on our site (anyone can set up a blog on our site; go here to get started).
Morris saw this story from March, which goes into the IT skills in high demand, such as security and convergence. There’s also a quote in there from Zeus Kerravala, a Yankee Group VP who says, “Things hard to do before, like setting up a switching and routing network, are easy today and don’t command so high a salary as things that are new today and harder to do.”
Morris was “shocked” by the quote. His point is that, if you’re going to do switching and routing today, you have to know ” MPLS, BGP (both internally and with carriers), dual-home servers, virtualization, load balancing, security devices and QoS everywhere.”
However, he acknowledges that there are 6,700 more CCIEs today than there were four years ago. So maybe the question is one of supply and demand. That is, more people have the know-how for switching and routing, and therefore having those skills isn’t as much of a career differentiator as it was in years past.
But “easier”? No.
What do you think? Are these skills more of a commodity today? Do you find your own organizations paying more for certain kinds of expertise? Let me know.
