Three weeks ago nobody at my company talked about VPN capacity. This week it is all anyone talks about. That sentence summarizes about half of what has happened to enterprise IT in March 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has done something that years of “future of work” conferences could not. It has taken remote work from an option that some organizations offered to some employees and turned it into the operating model for essentially every organization that can make it work at all. Overnight, IT departments that had designed their remote access infrastructure for maybe fifteen percent of their workforce are being asked to support a hundred percent of it simultaneously. Some of those departments were ready. Many were not.
What this means for IT professionals in practical career terms is that remote access, VPN architecture, network security for distributed users, and endpoint management have gone from moderately important skills to business-critical competencies in about thirty days. Organizations are discovering gaps in their infrastructure in real time and they need people who can address those gaps right now and design something better for the long term.
From a certification standpoint, a few credentials are looking more relevant than they did in February. The Cisco certifications that cover network security and VPN configuration, including content covered in the CCNA and CCNP Security tracks, map directly to the problems organizations are wrestling with right now. Cisco has a solid overview of their security certification paths available at the Cisco certifications page if you want to understand how the tracks connect.
CompTIA Security+ and Network+ are also worth mentioning in this context. Security+ in particular covers VPN concepts, remote access security, and the kinds of endpoint and identity considerations that become critical when your entire workforce is connecting from home networks of varying quality and security posture. These are not exotic concepts on the Security+ exam. They are core content.
There is a broader point here about how crisis moments accelerate the relevance of certain skills. The organizations that navigated this transition best were the ones with strong network engineering talent on staff and solid security fundamentals in their remote access design. That talent is going to be in demand for a while. The infrastructure decisions being made right now, hastily in many cases, are going to need to be revisited and hardened over the next twelve to eighteen months. That is work for people who understand these systems properly.
If you have been sitting on a plan to pursue networking or security certifications and waiting for the right moment, this is a reasonable time to accelerate that plan. The skills are directly applicable to a problem that is affecting every organization simultaneously. That kind of universal relevance does not come along often.
Stay well. Study when you can. This is a good time to be building skills that matter.
Brian Rhoades is a Senior VMware Instructor and IT veteran with more than 15 years of hands-on experience in virtualization, systems engineering, and cloud infrastructure. He has trained thousands of IT professionals to confidently work with VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, and has authored multiple books and study guides for outlets across the industry. Brian has a habit of being somewhere new every few weeks, which if you've ever tried to pin down a good VMware instructor, explains a lot.