[142816] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nathan Eisenberg)
Wed Jul 13 20:18:21 2011
From: Nathan Eisenberg <nathan@atlasnetworks.us>
To: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:18:04 +0000
In-Reply-To: <20110713212838.GA17526@pob.ytti.fi>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> > Given what you know now, if you were 21 and just starting into
> > networking / communications industry which areas of study or specialty
> > would you prioritize?
>=20
> But in all seriousness, networking like I suppose most professions are no=
t
> about knowing one thing and stopping. It's evolving rather rapidly so mos=
t
> thing you know now are irrelevant in decade or two. What you should learn=
is
> how to learn, how to attack problems and learn to love doing both.
Totally agree.=20
IMHO, the truly challenging (and most important) skills aren't technical in=
nature. They're things like the ability to work in, or especially lead, a=
team of people. Things like building functional business processes that a=
ccount for all the little details of operations, or professionally handling=
customers with utterly disparate cultural values (timeliness, the honoring=
of contractual obligations, etc).
So, I would put a strong initial emphasis on logic and critical thinking, a=
s well as intercultural competence and basic business leadership/process en=
gineering. I'd also snap up any courses I could find on learning effective=
ly or on using research tools. Once you can learn effectively in a short p=
eriod of time, and you know how to find the information you need to absorb,=
it becomes fairly trivial to acquire new technical (or otherwise) capaciti=
es.
In fact, the limiting factor starts to become your imagination - "what do y=
ou think you want to learn?", and the best way to combat this is to have a =
balanced life with a healthy dose of social interaction (read: women - late=
r, family). I've not yet met the person who won't burn out if they aren't =
distracted by non-virtual concerns on a regular basis.
Nathan Eisenberg
