Closing The IT Network Skills Gap

How managers can understand and prepare for new networking skill requirements

A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Cisco

Executive Summary
Managing talent in the network environment is becoming increasingly challenging for CIOs, IT
managers, and HR decision-makers. Traditionally, the network has been viewed as the “dial tone”
of IT — providing “always on and always available” connectivity. But the network’s sophistication is
evolving rapidly as it transitions from a basic transport system to a business-critical application and
services delivery platform. To keep pace with the new business requirements, companies are
investing heavily in new tools and infrastructure.

As the sophistication of the network increases, however, the skills requirements for network
professionals will also increase. Traditional positions within the network - such as network
architects, engineers, and administrators - require employees with more specialized skills and
greater levels of experience. At the same time, new job skills related to security, voice, wireless,
and remote office work are becoming critical to the functionality of the network. What should IT
managers do? They need to hire, train, and ramp dedicated professionals. In this rapidly changing
network environment, network education, skills assessment tools, and training and certification
programs are required.

We recommend that hiring managers take a three-phase approach:

1. Focus on roles, not titles. IT organizations can prepare for these changes by focusing on
the evolution of network roles. Unlike job titles, which may vary significantly between
organizations, roles are universal and do not vary significantly - regardless of a company’s
geography, industry, or size.

2. Assess your skills gaps. By examining the skills requirements of various network-related
roles and understanding how these roles are changing, IT organizations can make more
targeted, effective investments and close skills gaps as networking roles evolve.

3. Provide training and certification to ensure relevant skills. The final step is to optimize
staffing by training and certifying network professionals. This will ensure that they can
execute on the hard skills (implementation, maintenance, and monitoring) as well as the
soft skills (architectural planning, project management, and business case justification)
necessary to keep pace with the evolution of the network.

Study Methodology
To understand how network roles are evolving, Cisco commissioned Forrester Consulting to
conduct a 1,500-response survey of individuals responsible for managing, evaluating, or hiring
network professionals. The survey was conducted in 10 countries, each with 150 survey responses,
and focused on three market-type categories:
• “Emerging” market countries: Brazil, China, South Korea, and India.
• “Early Transforming” market countries: Mexico and Russia.
• “Mature” market countries: United States/Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, and Japan.
The goal of the survey was to gather data about the various job roles within the network and
understand how skills requirements would change over a five-year time horizon. In addition, we
professional certifications, and how they had progressed through their own network careers.

The Evolution Of The IT Network
Network managers are under pressure to ensure the network is fail-safe. They’re tasked with
providing secure access to an expanding portfolio of applications to an increasingly distributed
workforce. Ensuring adequate levels of service is becoming more difficult, with a host of new
business-critical technologies now interacting with the network. As with many technology domains,
the innovation in networking tools is outpacing the skills required to implement and manage them.
The macro-level issues affecting the network can be reduced to three familiar areas: people,
process, and technology.

• People. The network is becoming a more critical asset for the business, but networking
professionals are still primarily viewed as just “firefighters” within most IT organizations. As
network technology evolves and the network becomes a more mission-critical component
of business processes, expect the profile of the typical network professional to change
dramatically. Networking staff will also need to be increasingly collaborative, working with
server, storage, security, and desktop colleagues to operate the network as an end-to-end
service delivery platform.

• Process. As IT matures into a process-driven organization — influenced by frameworks
like ITIL — and the network becomes more closely tied to the business, the managers of
the network are being held more accountable.1 As a result, managers are now responsible
for measuring success on a whole new set of metrics such as service levels, process
refinements, and other service delivery and support requirements. In particular, network
professionals will have to streamline implementation processes as well as align ongoing
operations with the business. This means service level agreements (SLAs) must reflect
revenue growth, profitability, productivity, and process optimization as opposed to the
traditional availability, packet loss, jitter, and throughput.

• Technology. Traditional network technologies are commoditizing, and advanced
technologies are becoming the mainstay for day-to-day network operations. SOA,
virtualized IT, and ubiquitous mobility are bringing the network “front and center” to the
business. If applied correctly, these new technologies allow companies to create the more
relevant SLAs as well as reduce costs, leverage existing infrastructure, increase security,
and increase productivity. However, if organizations expect to maximize the value from their
new technologies, they’ll need network professionals who are trained on the technologies
and have the skills necessary to manage them.

A Role-Focused View Of The Network
To prepare for the changes in the network, network hiring managers need to first understand the
evolution of network roles. In this paper, we distinguish a “role” from a “title” or a “position” in order
to focus on the underlying skills required to support a typical network. For example, the network
architect “role” has traditionally had responsibility for design and strategy. Though the title for the
network architect role could vary across companies of different geographies, industries, or company
sizes, the responsibilities of this role are likely to be consistent.
As part of an initial analysis, Forrester categorized the network roles into two broad categories: IT
infrastructure (and operations) and IT architecture. Forrester identified 11 roles that require network
expertise (see Figure 1). However, we also determined that three of these roles — enterprise architect, security architect, and infrastructure generalist — required fewer networking-specific skills
and overlapped significantly with the remaining eight roles.2 We then explicitly tested these eight
roles by surveying the 1,500 IT managers worldwide.
To further explore these roles and determine which have critical mass, we asked organizations
whether there was a person with dedicated responsibility or shared responsibilities for these
network-related functions (i.e., as opposed to outsourced to a third party or not managed at all). See
Appendix A for the distribution of respondents by company size.

The majority of respondents said that these roles exist within their network operations and
architecture staff. Between 36% and 55% of respondents stated that they have a position within
their organization that is fully dedicated to carrying out responsibilities related to that role. The
second column shows the percent of organizations that have “shared” roles, meaning the role exists
but is covered by an individual with multiple responsibilities. For example, a network engineer may
double as the resident voice and security specialist.
While Forrester does not expect the 11 job roles outlined in Figure 1 to change significantly over a
five-year time horizon, we do expect to see the development of at least two new roles. In particular,
we expect the importance of mobility specialists and unified communications specialists to grow as
IT organizations adapt to the new network functionalities that are becoming more embedded in
networks. We anticipate that these emerging roles will encompass more than just networking; they’ll be a critical liaison between network-specific expertise, end user devices, and collaboration
applications