OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again...

Thu Jul 14 00:18:04 UTC 2011

> > Given what you know now, if you were 21 and just starting into
> > networking / communications industry which areas of study or specialty
> > would you prioritize?
> 
> But in all seriousness, networking like I suppose most professions are not
> about knowing one thing and stopping. It's evolving rather rapidly so most
> thing you know now are irrelevant in decade or two. What you should learn is
> how to learn, how to attack problems and learn to love doing both.

Totally agree. 

IMHO, the truly challenging (and most important) skills aren't technical in nature.  They're things like the ability to work in, or especially lead, a team of people.  Things like building functional business processes that account for all the little details of operations, or professionally handling customers with utterly disparate cultural values (timeliness, the honoring of contractual obligations, etc).

So, I would put a strong initial emphasis on logic and critical thinking, as well as intercultural competence and basic business leadership/process engineering.  I'd also snap up any courses I could find on learning effectively or on using research tools.  Once you can learn effectively in a short period of time, and you know how to find the information you need to absorb, it becomes fairly trivial to acquire new technical (or otherwise) capacities.

In fact, the limiting factor starts to become your imagination - "what do you think you want to learn?", and the best way to combat this is to have a balanced life with a healthy dose of social interaction (read: women - later, family).  I've not yet met the person who won't burn out if they aren't distracted by non-virtual concerns on a regular basis.

Nathan Eisenberg