If you’re hunting for a network architect, especially one who knows your business, good luck — they’re hard to find. The same applies if you’re trying to fill positions that require a combination of networking and security expertise.
If you’re a job-seeker, having any of those skills, or experience in network support, will help you. But you also need breadth of networking knowledge combined with business acumen and the ability to deal with people.
In an August research report, “What Are the Hot Roles in IT?” Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. highlights the role of network architect at a “very hot” IT job.
Responsible for network design at the local and enterprise level, network architects have always been in demand, says Marc Cecere, a vice-president at Forrester and author of the report. Today, though, there is a particular need for enterprise network architects who can make things work across the entire corporation. “It’s been in sync with the general trend toward consolidation of infrastructure,” Cecere says.
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In organizations that outsource much of their IT function, Cecere adds, there is a growing need for network architects who are good at overseeing outside service providers. They are scarce because network architects have historically tended to be hands-on problem solvers.
Forrester’s report divided its list of 16 hot IT jobs into four groups: hot, very hot, extremely hot and hottest. Only two roles, neither of them directly networking-related, made the hottest category: information/data architect and information security expert. The latter is a clear indication of the current focus on security, and Kevin Dee, chief executive of IT recruiting firm Eagle Professional Resources Inc. in Ottawa, says that shows up in the networking field too.
Though demand for different network-related jobs varies somewhat across the country, Dee says, “what seems to be consistent everywhere is the security around the network.” So network security and identity management skills are in great demand, and in the health-care sector, knowledge of the Health Level 7 (HL7) standard for exchanging and storing health-care information securely is a valuable asset for job-seekers.
“If you’re an enterprise putting in solutions that are national, global or whatever it may be, security is going to be a major concern for you,” Dee says.
Terry Power, president of recruiter Sapphire Technologies Canada Ltd. in Toronto, says general network support roles are also in demand. That’s in line with a strong demand for support staff in IT generally, he adds. And Power says many employers are looking for project management skills.
Another good thing to have on your resumé is experience with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) frameworks for IT management. More organizations are adopting ITIL and looking for people with previous experience of it, Dee says. “It’s still relatively hard to find the skill set, but it’s not as bad as it was a year ago.”
Some skills are hot in certain parts of the country. In the west, Dee says, Active Directory expertise is in demand. In Ontario, network skills combined with health-care experience will stand you in good stead, thanks to lots of activity in that sector. Senior roles that demand more experience are usually the hardest to fill. For instance, Power says just having certification on, say, Cisco or Microsoft products isn’t enough for employers to beat a path to your door, but more senior jobs involving those skills are tougher to fill.
That’s Bradley White’s experience. The manager of distributed computing at Toromont Industries in Mississauga, Ont., had a hard time filling an intermediate position that required knowledge of local-area, wide-area and wireless networking with Cisco products.
After working with a recruiter and failing to find someone with the technical skills he wanted, White says he decided to retrain a staff member who had been working with the Windows operating system and applications. Now he is looking for a suitable replacement to fill that person’s old job, and having similar problems finding someone with the right combination of technical skills, business knowledge and interpersonal skills.
Power says that combination of technical and business knowhow is still an issue, though he adds that some universities and colleges have been doing a better job in the last few years of balancing both knowledge areas.
What employers want most, he says, is still people who have both a solid technical background and knowledge of the employer’s particular business, be it banking, retailing, manufacturing or whatever. “Invariably the people that understand the business along with the technology will be the folks I think who will have the greatest impact.”
Forrester placed mobile operations and devices experts in the hot category in its August report. Cecere says the need for people who know how to secure and synchronize mobile devices and make custom applications work on them has been growing as more businesses start taking real advantage of the devices and especially adding their own applications. “Once they start doing that,” he says, “the devices get much more complex.”
Specialization is all very well, but Dee says good general knowledge of networking is important, especially if you don’t want to relocate to where your particular skills happen to be in demand this year. “If you want to always be busy,” he says, “I think you want to aim for the stuff that people will always need.”
Smaller organizations in particular tend to want networking people with a general knowledge of the field, Cecere says, while the opportunities for specialists tend to be in the larger employers.
Nigel Fortlage, vice-president of information technology at Winnipeg-based customs brokerage firm GHY International, says the key skills he looks for are network management, security and control, which includes creating administrative interfaces and utilities to aid in system operation.
Recent economic troubles mean new graduates may have a tougher time finding networking-related jobs and IT jobs generally in the short term, Power says, but that will be “a blip” going against a longer-term trend. The aging of the population means a lot of older IT and network people will be retiring in the next few years, he says, and jobs will be increasingly tough to fill.