Sheep Guarding Llama

I have found that there are two approaches to continuing IT career growth: Growing Organically (aka Pyramid Skills) or what I like to call “Going for the Jugular” (aka Needle Skills.) Both are viable methods for advancing your career and working deeper into the field.

Growing Organically means accumulating a broad base of knowledge covering many bases before moving on to more advanced learning within a specific area. This approach means that it will take some time before you have an opportunity to spend working with advanced skill sets but it has many advantages also. By growing your knowledge slowly and evenly you have the chance to get a solid appreciation across the IT disciplines. This is important because almost all job roles involve a tremendous amount of cross-discipline interaction and by understanding the technologies, functions, roles and challenges or different disciplines you will have more ability to work within your own as well as to work with people in other areas.

Taking the time grow your knowledge base, to ensure a thorough understanding of many discipline area basics will slow immediate career growth but provide a more powerful foundation for increased growth later in the career and provide more stability to allow for greater changes as the field continues to grow and change on its own. By accumulated a strong base of knowledge across many areas you will be much more capable of withstanding job changes, reassignments, role changes, etc. IT is a field that expects great changes over very short periods of time and specific skill knowledge is not generally as highly rewarded as broader knowledge and experience will be over time.

Taking the time to establish a firm foundation from the beginning will provide for safety as well as making continued education easier and faster in the future.

Going for the Jugular refers to specializing very easy on in a very select field of study. This could include XHTML Web Development, C++ Programming, Solaris Systems Administration, Cisco Networking, etc. This type of skill development allows for very quick development within a highly concentrated area of study and does not provide the obvious large base of knowledge that learning more organically will do.

I refer to this as developing “needle skills” because it is a slender vertically aligned knowledge set involved. Knowledge will go very deep very quickly but available job roles will be extremely specific. The obvious advantage to developing “needle skills” is that one can focus on areas of interest to the exclusion of other areas early on in the career and pay scales will increase more quickly during the early career years.

By going for the jugular there is a long term career consequence of reducing the ability to move into management as well as making only larger organizations with more specific available job roles good career targets. This cuts the potential job field almost in half in many cases.

Choosing between modes of study requires deciding between a tradeoff between short term financial gains and long term stability and greater total career growth. I recommend taking the time to become well versed in many disciplines – even those that are less exciting and interesting because the advantages of this method will become evident within very little time and can be critical during early career years when jobs are scarce and being picky about job role is not a reasonable option.

To illustrate through some of my own experiences I wanted to talk about the network that I built at home in the late 1990s. When I was building my own home network it was very uncommon for people to have networks at home and “home networking equipment” was not yet available so I was working with small office equipment by default. I was on a tight budget so everything that I did had to be very inexpensive and practical.

Before I started building my home network the only piece of gear that I had was a Pentium based workstation without any Ethernet card. I had to add that myself. I bought a small five way hub and mounted it in the basement of my two story (three with basement) apartment. I ran CAT3 to each floor of the apartment. I put a workstation in my bedroom on the top floor. I added a large workbench in the basement.

I hunted around and found a shop selling used Intel 386 and 486 based Compaqs. I bought several and set three up on the metal workbench in the basement. I got an early copy of Linux and installed it on all three machines. Doing a Linux install was no small feat at the time. Even doing a Windows NT install could be incredibly challenging. Having the command line only Linux machines gave me a lot of opportunity to work with UNIX at home and made learning about IP networking much easier.

At the time that I was first building my educational home network the only Internet access that I was able to get reasonably was dial-up. Getting a serial/modem router was expensive and difficult at the time so I was forced to build my own. I was studying for the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification at the time and Microsoft provided free time-limited copies of the operating system for use while studying. I used Windows NT 4.0 Server and Proxy Server 2.0 to build a high performance, caching, firewall/proxy that would manage all of the Internet access for the house while the caching proxy would accelerate the Internet access.

I was fortunate that this setup provided an “always-on” Internet connection at a time when the idea of having something like that at home was almost unheard of and all of the computers were able to talk to each other very quickly. Adding the caching proxy made a very big difference for web surfing performance. This was one of the best steps that I took during this period.

To encourage the use of the network for a wider audience and to provide artificial challenges for myself I built a MUD server that run on one of the faster Linux machines and could be accessed from anywhere in the house. I managed user accounts, tuned machines, did break/fix, installed new software, programmed, etc. This network, incredibly basic by today’s standards, was quite impressive at the time and gave me a significant advantage in interviews and on my resume. I was told my interviewers at the time that my initiate and willingness to spend so much time at home working with these technologies was one of, if not the, most impressive thing on my resume.

I found it additionally helpful that I was using commercial Compaq Deskpro desktops, even if they were old, because I would often compete for desktop support contracts and having worked directly with Deskpros put me above many people competing for the same jobs who had only ever played around with consumer PCs. This was a critical lesson for me. Consumer is not the same as commercial and companies know that. Shortly after that I decided to stop using desktop machines to work with as servers – which is still common today almost a decade later. I went out and bought an old Compaq Proliant server complete with RAID controller, hot-swap SCSI drives, etc. This took my home network to a new level or seriousness and gave potential employers something to really think about. There was very little hardware that I hadn’t worked with directly and when I talked about working with Windows NT 4.0 Server they knew that I meant on server class equipment in the way that big businesses were using it.

As the cost of older equipment drops and the cost of software continues to plummet (enterprise operating systems are very inexpensive today as are many commercial database products, firewalls, etc.) enterprising young IT professionals have greater and greater expectations to live up to. Today everyone, even non-IT professionals, have extensive home networks with switched Ethernet and hardware firewalls. Consumer class servers are being introduced by Microsoft to bring obvious data management features into the home. Media centers and the associated servers for them are beginning to appear in homes now as well. Everyone has high speed, always on Internet access. Now we expect to see even more from an IT professional’s home learning network.

A home network at first should cover basic systems and networking technologies.  As the student advances the network should advance to reflect the technologies that he or she is hoping to work with in the office.  The home network should be used as a means to push forward – to gain experience in areas where the traditional workplace may not be providing enough resources or opportunities.  Even if the career stalls the educational process should not and the home network can be used to leverage that education into a form of experience that can be invaluable when that same experience cannot be gained through traditional employment.