CCNA Career Tips – 3 Areas To Focus On In Your New CCNA Job As A Networks Engineer

ccna-network-engineer

Developing strong technical skills and core network fundamentals are very important to your CCNA career. You need to review all the best CCNA books, however, if you want to improve your skills as a qualified CCNA networks engineer, here are 3 areas I suggest you focus on to become effective in your role in the quickest time possible:

1. Troubleshooting Skills

Troubleshooting skills are the bread and butter of any network engineer. As you progress you might be doing less and less troubleshooting and more deployment, but as a relative beginner it is the single most important skill you should develop as a good CCNA networks engineer.

This is even more evident evident from the newer Cisco exams, which have been structured to have more focus on debugging and fixing problems. Most of the entry-level jobs are support positions, where you will be identifying and fixing network issues reported by users about 80% of the time. It is thus important to become good at troubleshooting as soon as possible, so as to be effective.

2. Management of Expectations

Very often problems that arise cannot be easily solved quickly. Some problems which are more vague in nature like the network being slow or intermittent disconnections can be hard to track down and fix. More complex and mysterious issues might take from several days to several weeks to fix. It is important to manage the users’ expectations properly and keep them updated with an estimate of when the problem can be solved. If not, you might end up with a situation where they will call you every 10 minutes for an update. This is a very important part of your CCNA career so don’t overlook it.

3. Planning One Step Ahead

The computer network industry is constantly in a state of flux and it is important to be abreast of the latest developments. In the ideal situation, you should start training for tomorrow’s trends and technologies, however, this can be expensive and not all companies and corporations are willing to spend their training budget in this manner. At the very least you should keep yourself up to date with the current market direction to ensure that you do well in your CCNA career. For example, it’s likely that areas like cloud computing and media convergence will become increasingly important over the next few years and these are heavily dependent on network technology.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Francis (SavvyNetCert.Com)