Today’s network engineers have to be flexible and adaptable, understand the new infrastructure-as-code paradigm, and stay on top of the latest developments in cloud, security, and AI.
Organizations aren’t necessarily looking for someone who is limited to a single vendor’s technology; they’re looking for employees who have skills across a wide variety of technologies and are constantly looking to broaden their areas of expertise.
Jeff Sangillo is vice-president of technology engineering and operations for QTS Data Centers. He manages both internal network connectivity between the company’s 30-plus data center locations, as well as customer-facing networking services and products.
“We’ve got thousands of route-switched devices and firewalls deployed, hundreds of thousands of ports under management, thousands of circuits that we manage for our own internal connectivity and on behalf of customers,” he says.
His team of 100 network engineers and cloud engineers have to understand cloud networking and network layer concepts. He expects networking employees to be strong in the fundamentals, such as the common routing protocols, IPV4 and IPV6, as well as high-level skills, such as software-defined networking.
