Network engineers require hard skills like technical know-how in order to succeed on the job, but more and more employers are also seeking candidates who demonstrate soft skills. Soft skills are useful and important in many areas of expertise. They are the skills that will bolster your job-specific skills and make you stand out across industries.
For example, a network engineer and a dental assistant have totally different responsibilities and duties, but soft skills like communication and organization are integral to both jobs. When you train to become a network engineer you will get hands on experience developing the knowledge you will need for your daily work, but you will also have the opportunity to work on your soft skills. Here are a few to pay attention to as you take the next steps in your career.
1. Cultivating Leadership Skills
Your network engineering courses will prepare you to work in all sorts of work places. Today most organizations, businesses and facilities require network engineers and system administrators to function. Your specific responsibilities will largely depend on the organization’s needs. This means that taking the lead and bringing employees together to make sure that you are addressing everyone’s needs is imperative.
A leader knows how to build confidence and guide collaboration to find solutions and address the requirements of a group. Your technical expertise will keep an organization’s operations running and you may have to explain complex concepts to many people. Whether you are designing network solutions or fixing a bug, your ability to work with others will reinforce the importance of your role.
2. Network Engineering Training Makes You Adaptable
If you are interested in network engineering training it probably means you like to learn and you are adaptable. Technology is always developing and to be successful in this field you have to enjoy developing alongside it. To a certain extent, this soft skill will be evident on your resume through your list of hard skills, such as certifications or programming language proficiencies.
Within a company, your ability to adapt will be important because you will have to take your hard skills and make them work for whatever the company needs. Is it a small team in one office, or a big team with remote offices? Will you work directly with employees or just with system administrators? A trained network engineer is ready to adapt to all of these different situations and make or maintain plans based on up to date technical knowledge.
3. Remaining Calm Under Pressure
Your responsibilities will likely include regular maintenance, installation of hardware and software as well as planning for network systems. However, you will also be called upon when there are network problems. Troubleshooting is often a technical process with a series of logical steps, but when you add a stressed out employee to the mix, you will also need to be able to stay calm.
You may have to explain what you are doing, or explain how to troubleshoot to someone else. Employees rely on networks so problems outside of their expertise might be extra frustrating for them. When you can stay calm under pressure, it will help you think through problem solving with more clarity. It is worth cultivating soft skills like these because they will enhance your technical abilities so you can work with a high level of efficiency.
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