Are Entry Level Jobs in Network Engineering Dead?

It used to be that you started off in helpdesk. With a technology degree, maybe you could've skipped it, but I never think that's a good idea. Then you would get a job as a Junior Network Administrator managing a campus LAN in-house or at an MSP (managed service provider).

With sufficient experience, knowledge, and certifications you would be able to get a Network Engineer title managing larger networks and having the opportunity to design and deploy networks.

Eventually, you might become a Network Architect who is principally responsible for designing and deploying large, complex networks.

Along the way, you might have specialized in data center, wireless, security, or service provider but it all started with that first networking job working a campus LAN.

As we find ourselves migrating our data centers to the cloud, shrinking our LAN's to SOHO networks simply able to reach the internet, WFH (work from home) reducing the need for office workspaces, devices like desk phones and printers all but disappearing, the primary concern of an entry level network administrator seems to be rapidly disappearing.

What do we do?

As a trade, like plumbing or electrical, we must be concerned about the pipeline of getting new tradesmen into our industry. If not, it could prove to be an existential crisis.

Not a crisis where we, the already anointed ones, will perish. Rather, a generational one where we might see those after us languish and be robbed into other professions. Their stairway to success might be too ambiguous and require them to stretch too many steps to get a foothold.

If this question is remotely ambiguous and top of mind for us networking professionals, I can assure you it is and will be a problem.

From Cisco to the Clouds to SDN, Automation and AI...

Networking was the domain of Computer Science until the era of the Internet. From there, a leader was born, Cisco, who would innovate faster then anyone else and make the interconnected world possible.

With Cisco's advent of their certification program, CCNA/CCNP/CCIE, many people could become specialists in the ubiquitous Cisco CLI and if you learned this foreign language, you were handsomely rewarded.

In the late 90's-early 2000's, if you had a pulse and the slightest inclination, you were signed up to work in IT with a wage enough to support yourself and a family.

The demand for networks was so high and the talent pool to deploy and manage them was so low and at that axis is where opportunity exists for new entrants.

It's no coincidence that most of the CCIE's and MCSE's we see touted around these days are from that era. It was a gold rush and everyone wanted their coin.

These days, not so much. In the early 2010's, network engineers began to diversify into the cloud and by 2016, it was all the rage. Network engineers didn't see the value in sitting for the CCIE, or even the CCNP, when you had this new wave of demand.

AWS, Azure, and GCP and their associated certifications were becoming more important. Network engineers began getting new titles like Cloud Engineer, DevOps, and SRE.

It is technology, after all. Unlike plumbing and electrical, technology moves at a rapid pace and requires us to keep up. Therefore, we don't band together and unionize like the others. Stagnation is death.

These days, everybody is cloud first and MSP's aren't installing server blades in closets anymore. No more beefy top of rack switches, just access to core, to the cloud.

No more desk phones, just soft phones.

No more printers, just paperless.

No more desktops and hard lines. Just laptops and AP's.

And now, Cisco Meraki.

With a Meraki box and AP's, the mysterious CLI is all but gone. Eliminating the mystery, and therefore the opportunity and fun, of being a network engineer. It has what we need for these glorified SOHO networks and it does it pretty well.

Even a sysadmin can just point and click their way to success. Kinda.

Network Automation and AI is the new layer to the onion. We're still seeing how that plays out.

What is an entry level network administrator to do?

Small business networks are shrinking in size and complexity. Hell, small businesses themselves are shrinking.

Back in 2000 it used to be that a company needed 1 IT person for every 10-20 people. These days, it's every 100-200.

Working at an MSP with enough small businesses wrangled together still generates enough networking deployments and tickets to cut your teeth but nothing complex. Usually, no routing or FHRP protocols at all.

Institutions like school districts, hospitals, and government do have large enough networks to experience the full life cycle of a network. However, a lot of the heavy lifting is done by vendors and VAR's (value added resellers). I think their tendency is to hire competent stewards with very few lower level support staff these days.

The vendor's and the VAR's usually want some sort of advanced experience.

Cisco has eliminated their CCNA specialties like CCNA Security so it's difficult, certification wise, to qualify for many networking specialties. On top of that, many claim that the CCNA itself has been watered down to the point where it doesn't qualify you for much.

I addressed a lot of this in my previous article, "What is the Certification Path for Network Engineers in 2023?", so I won't revisit that here.

At the risk of becoming too lengthy, I don't want to pontificate too much further on this topic, either. I just want to point it out and I'm not the only one.

If I and other network engineers are asking this question, it's worth formally starting the conversation. I implore you to help explore this topic in the comments of this article.