By Ranjana Kakodkar
As our country continues to sprint forward at supersonic speed in an attempt to achieve supremacy in every sundry field you can imagine companies world wide are spreading their tentacles across the saath samundar, all the way to cities and towns across India, enticed by the allure of a mega success story in the making.

All these far flung offices need to be connected and that is exactly where computer networks come to the rescue. Remember those Jurassic like times when there was no email, no msn messenger and no way in which you could send a funny video of you doing a spoof on Shahrukh Khan to your “college-ka-yaar” in New Zealand? Gasp! Did such a time even exist? What did we even do before computers got linked together using devices like routers, switches, backend servers and firewalls! People who understand these marvellous webs of technology and manage them are called network engineers (they might be called by other monikers like network administrators, network analysts and such like, but the duties are either the same or they closely overlap).
A network engineer connects offices with sophisticated equipment and cables, hooking the company up to the Internet, and configuring all its internal systems, such as net routers and firewalls. Other jobs would include designing network infrastructure, determining the requirements for the system architecture, installing and configuring the components of the system architecture and monitoring, optimising and troubleshooting when problems arise.
The king in the networking industry today, is, Cisco Systems and consequently this company has set up educational tie-ups with institutes, engineering colleges and educational academies to impart training in their products and acquire various certifications which are highly prized in the industry by top notch employers. The most basic ones are CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Analyst), CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional) and at the very top of the mountain is the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert) which is offered in Routing and Switching, Communication and Services and finally Security. These certifications will teach students how to configure and operate LANs (Local Area Networks), WANs (Wide Area Networks) to managing huge networks and a thorough knowledge of various networking protocols like IP, IPX, OSPF and a host of other esoteric sounding monikers.
You don’t have to possess a hard core engineering background to pursue this field. All you need is a passion for learning techie stuff, math, science and computers. You can be from just about any background. After that getting the requisite real life experience is necessary and then continuous upgrading of your skills through re-certification will take you up the ladder.
(Ranjana Kakodkar is Director and Founder of a state-of-the-art institution devoted to personal growth and learning, She is known for her expertise in conducting and evaluating IQ and Aptitude tests. Send in your career-related queries to careerfocus07@gmail.com)