Expertise Roles

Architects, Consultants and Designers
Architects, Consultants and DesignersDesigning, installing and maintaining a reliable physical cable plant is essential to the well-being of today's mission-critical LANs. End-user organizations, builders, property owners and contractors hire you as a professional consultant to analyze, design and recommend telecommunications products and services.
Contractors and Installers
Contractors and installers—the professionals who are responsible for designing, installing and certifying structured wiring networks for their customers—are facing huge challenges as well as opportunities in today’s market. Several trends are having a dramatic impact on networking and on the roles of these professionals, who are charged with planning and deploying networks for organizations.
Network Engineers
There are several major trends happening in the role of the Network Engineer. No matter what type of business is being supported by the network, the engineer is constantly being tasked with new projects. Included in these is the implementation of new technologies such as virtual infrastructure in the Data Center, improved wireless systems to support and secure BYOD, rolling critical applications to cloud services, supporting Unified Communications and Video services, and maintaining top performance for applications and services such as VoIP. On the cabling end of things, with 10GBASE-T ports being introduced,the Network Engineer is required to ensure the infrastructure cabling is up to par for the future needs of the business. Of course all these trends must take place on a limited budget, reduced staff, and no downtime.The Network Engineer of today is also considered the final escalation point for any performance problem, regardless if the root cause is the network, server, or application. They are expected to have the tools to isolate and identify the issue, working with server and application teams to bring it to resolution. “It’s not the network” is no longer an acceptable response to a performance problem, and there is a growing trend in the Network Engineer role to resolve root cause, no matter who is to blame.
Network Technicians & Operations
Network Technicians and Operations are tasked with supporting more business critical applications and services than ever before. This trend has expanded the role of Network Operations in both scale and importance. In most IT organizations, Network Operations is taking on more responsibility due to the increased number and complexity of new networking technologies, consolidation of responsibility across multiple sites, reduction in IT staff, and in providing greater support to network engineering organizations.The infrastructure supporting business applications continues to change through virtual switching and Cloud migration, which limits the visibility of network and application management platforms. However, Network Operations is still tasked with monitoring these systems with little access to the components that support them. Due to the 24/7/365 demand on these business systems, Network Operations also requires mobile access to these management tools, as well as shareable automated reporting to facilitate escalation and team resolution.