The Network Timebomb!?

Happy Friday everyone! We had our Annual VIEW event this week.? I’m thrilled to say there was record attendance and that the feedback from clients I met with was extremely positive…even despite me presenting some of the time!

There will be a much more formal write-up of the topics covered and the event itself over on the Kocho website and there are some big ticket items I will probably dig into in future Bytes.

However for now, there was a comment made during the presentation by our friends at Juniper that struck a chord with me and I thought I’d quickly mention it here this week…

For once this is nothing to do with technology.? This is all about people.

Those of you working in security will no doubt be very aware of the fact that there is a global shortage of IT Security Analysts at present.? IT Security a massive growth area across the board and there is a very real skills gap in most markets.? Chances are if you’re looking to start your career in IT these days, then IT Security will be where you’ll stand a good chance of getting that first role.

What was news to me was when Juniper mentioned a coming skills shortage for Network Engineers.?

So for today I thought I’d dig into this little nugget (and massive thanks to Zippia for the data shown here…..take a look at https://www.zippia.com/network-engineer-jobs/demographics/ if you want to dig further into it).

Take a look at this graph that compares the average age of Network Engineers to IT Security Analysts:

Eye opening isn’t it!?

Network engineers are getting older and the young blood is presumably going elsewhere.? 60% of network engineers (in this dataset anyway) are 40+ years old…wow! And compare and contrast to the world of IT Security which we know first-hand is a popular Graduate destination.

Interestingly, just as AI is touted as the answer to scalability in Security Operations longer term, so Juniper were making the point that AI will be the answer to do the same for network management as the number of network engineers starts to drop off.? Be interested in your comments....does this tally with what you see?

If you need help deploying these AI solutions (or running the network for you) then, as always, Kocho have the skills to sort this.? Feel free to get in touch:

https://kocho.co.uk/contact-us/

And got to love GenAI for image creation!