How to start a Network Engineer Career

What are your goals?

The new year is traditionally a time of change, a time when we take a moment to re-evaluate all those ideas and plans we’ve had throughout the year and commit to goals we will personally focus on for the upcoming year. If you are considering how to start a network engineer career, you made a great choice!

Networking as a career

Although Networking is a stable and mature industry, it continues to rapidly grow, with more vendor options on the market than ever before. The increasing market share, historically attributed to the likes of Cisco and Juniper, now has a heavy hitter in Arista who has reported its first $1 billion quarter.

“In Q2 2022, we achieved our first billion-dollar revenue quarter, despite the challenges of an uncertain supply chain environment,” said Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO of Arista Networks. “This record milestone further validates the customer value of Arista’s differentiated cloud networking platforms, now adopted by many of the largest cloud and enterprise customers around the world.”

(source: www.arista.com)

Due to the fast moving nature of the industry, training is an important part of career and skills development. Training can equip you with essential skills for starting a new career, help you acquire further skills to find more senior engineering positions, or provide expertise in understanding how to work with each vendor’s specific technology.

Why start network engineer career with Arista?

The Arista Cloud Engineer Program takes a fresh approach to network engineer training by making it relevant to the industry. This progressive approach lets students select the training required to develop a unique network engineering skill set rather than attending all courses in order.

Arista courses have been designed with an adaptable open-standard approach, focusing on recommended practices for different networking solutions. You can study with Arista and apply what you have learned to any existing network, regardless of vendor.

Arista’s ACE course content is curated for job-specific skills, like network engineer and cloud engineer, and to be specific to different verticals, including Global Financials, Media & Entertainment and Service Providers.

Courses to start your network career

There are many routes to starting a career in networking. Many people we meet in the industry do not actually set out seeking a career in networking. They may start with careers in other areas of IT or in a completely unrelated field, looking for a new challenge.

Within our team alone, we have people who started with jobs in programming, working as IT engineers, developers, etc., as well as people who left military careers looking to take a new direction. Either way, the first step involves learning new skills!

Become a Cloud Novice & Cloud Associate

Whether you are interested in working in network security, architecture, or support, understanding the foundations of computer networks and how they work is integral. Everything you do in your career will build upon these foundational skills.

Learning networking fundamental topics ranging from Ethernet, TCP/IP, and Routing & Switching to network design for Enterprise Data Center and Campus networks is a great starting point.

Arista’s Cloud Engineer Program includes these fundamental topics within their career building courses: ACE:L1 and ACE:L2. These courses have been created specifically for individuals entering the network engineering field and looking to acquire the essential knowledge and skills applied to modern network infrastructure.

Start your networking journey now!