Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

APRICOT The networking industry should address its perennial staff shortage by giving early-career techies the kind of hands-on training delivered during apprenticeships for trainee carpenters or electricians.

That's the opinion of Alexis Bertholf, a 28-year-old Megaport technology evangelist whose networking-centric videos and other online content has seen her accumulate a social media following of more than 200,000 people, as she advocates to "make network engineering cool again."

"Back in the early 2000s building out the internet was the coolest thing you could possibly do," she told The Register at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Kuala Lumpur this week.

But networks are now just assumed to work and they're not front of mind.

"I was working with the CIO of a company and he said they were cloud first, so when they built their new building they didn't put wiring closets anywhere," she said in her conference keynote.

"The networking team went to their leadership and said: 'Hey, where are we going to put the network gear?' The CIO said 'Why do we need a wiring closet, we're a cloud first company'."

Attitudes like that show networking is less cool now. One artifact of that shift is career paths into the field have become formal and slow.

Bertholf said they typically see graduates hired to work on help desks and encouraged to gain experience by building and experimenting with a home lab or acquiring vendor certifications so they can secure a role in a network operations center. While that progression builds skills, it can mean a decade or more passes before they advance into more meaningful network engineering roles.

She feels skills shortages show that career structure has not served the industry well and that change is needed, and fast, because the cohort of senior engineers who joined the field when it was cool are starting to retire. Bertholf fears it will be hard to find appropriately experienced replacements to step into their shoes.

"When you guys leave the industry, we're also going to be losing decades of problem solving approaches that you only get from building and maintaining networks for years and years," she said.

Her solution is to have senior engineers and their employers become open to accelerated career development for young techies under a model that sees new recruits work hands-on with experienced techies in circumstances similar to apprenticeships.

"I really think the trades got it right," she said during an APRICOT keynote during which she applauded "apprenticeships where maybe you go to class, you get the piece of paper, and then you go work under a master electrician or plumber or mechanic for a couple years before you're considered able to go and do the work on your own."

She told the conference she feels apprenticeships are appropriate because: "Network engineering to me is a skilled trade. Being a developer is a skilled trade." Bertholf also thinks apprenticeships are better than short internships.

"Three months doesn't substitute working under someone for a long period of time," she said in her keynote.

Bertholf thinks senior networkers have a responsibility to take the time to work intensively with new industry entrants for two reasons, one of which is that having built the internet they must surely appreciate the need for skilled people to keep it resilient.

The other is that senior network engineers did their job too well. Networks permeate everyday life but are also all-but-invisible so kids can't easily appreciate how they lead to careers. Imagining life as a developer is far easier because kids are often taught how to code, and can see the results every time they play a game.

Bertholf thinks the new generation need to realize that networking careers can be fabulous.

"There is literally not a single business that can operate in today's day and age without the network, so you have tons of options," she said. "If you get bored [by a job] you can always migrate because you have a transferable skill.

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If networking elders are to train apprentices, Bertholf thinks they'll need to appreciate that young people have different communication preferences.

Bertholf told The Reg her first mobile device was a feature phone, but her younger siblings went straight to smartphones. The result is members of the same family and generation have each evolved different communication preferences.

Accelerated education for the next generation of networkers, she feels, will challenge senior networkers to find appropriate ways to impart their knowledge to groups of twenty-somethings.

That may mean TikTok, which Bertholf explained she used before attending APRICOT to find unfiltered advice created by locals about what to do while in Malaysia. Because that's what twenty-somethings do naturally, and probably not a comfortable option for their experienced elders.

"They might need to put their ego aside," she suggested, and embracing new mediums will be necessary if senior networkers want to help grow a new generation of workers who preserve and advance their achievements.

The Register put it to Bertholf that there probably isn't a lot of internetworking content on TikTok, and she agreed. But she's trying to change that and thinks that if more people adopt the same mission it will help the networking industry to recruit and train the next generation of people who keep that service – and myriad others – running reliably into the future. ®