13 Skills Every IT Pro Should Know

[Darren Dirt]

http://www.globalknowledge.com/articles/generic.asp?pageid=2475

...I guess I feel less of a "pro" now...

[Lazybones]

1. Programming
- Check, however I am not sure this is really an everyone skill

2. Learning from the book The Mythical Man-Month
- Will have to look into it.

3. Understanding the basics of networking
- Check


4. Know security best practices within your IT discipline
-Check

5. The benefits and caveats of capital expenditures
- Check, I run into this a lot

6. IP addressing
- Check

7. Perl and Tcl
- Not sure I agree, this is a very UNIX/LINUX domain skill. or something that Cisco admins have to rely on heavily to fill in for the almost complete lack of management tools and demand than CLI is king. Get some Juniper gear and you get a far better management options.

8. Using the OSI model for network troubleshooting
- Understand it, but always have trouble remembering every layers name.

9. Packet sniffing
- Use wireshark fairly often.

10. Google is your friend
- Google is my friend

11. Create a good PowerPoint presentation
- We should all be good at this by now.. Although my manager is the one that has to pitch things, I normally use a whiteboard.

12. Keep your e-mail under control
- Filters are your friend.

13. Know why network delay is bad
- I HATE US ISPs!... ms? Try seconds for regular Internet IP traffic in some cases. Comcast why do you hate Canada?
- MPLS and SLAs should be part of this skill.

[Thorin]

7. Perl and Tcl
- Not sure I agree, this is a very UNIX/LINUX domain skill. or something that Cisco admins have to rely on heavily

Yeah, that whole article read like a "How to be a Cisco-based network admin" advertisement, to me.

[Tom]

What, theres something out there besides Cisco? You jest!

[Lazybones]

What, theres something out there besides Cisco? You jest!

Yes there is juniper and cisco.. Juniper is under the hood of a bunch of big ISPs also it is one of the vendors Google uses for its infrastructure (before they started building their own custom stuff).

Cisco makes great switches and routers.. but believe it or not it is ranked 3rd or 4th when it comes to firewalls.