The path to Network Engineer? Technical Knowledge...

What technical knowledge do you need to become a network engineer? I don't know for sure, but I tried to find it by looking at job postings at 5 big job search sites like Monster.com. I looked at ~10 entries of each site for a total of 50+. I made a spreadsheet and figured out what the most common keywords were on job listings for "Network Engineer".


I'm splitting this into 3 parts: 'General area of knowledge', 'Specific area's of knowledge' and 'Other commonly listed items'. 

The job listings used are with the title "Network Engineer" only. Job Listings of "Senior Network Engineer" are not included because that would be way, way too long. 

Note: The second column denotes occurence.


Job Postings from 5 job search sites, 50+ postings combined:



General area's of knowledge:

VPN	12
LAN	10
Firewall	10
Network Security	9
TCP/IP	8
Voice/VoIP	7
WAN	7
Wireless	6
Network Design	4

Other common misc. General Area's of knowledge with only 1-3 entries:

• IPv6
• Video
• VLAN
• Dynamic Routing Protocol
• OSI

Specific Area's of Knowledge (Topic / Occurence):

BGP	16
OSPF	14
MPLS	9
EIGRP	8
IPSec	7
QoS	5
HSRP/VRRP	5
PPP/HDLC	3
Multicast	3
DHCP	3
SNMP	3
STP	3
T1\T3\DS1\DS3	2
ATM	2
Frame Relay	2
ARP	2
802.1Q	2
802.1QinQ	2

Other commonly listed items:

• Scripting (Perl, Php, Python, Shell)
• Load balancers (F5)
• Linux
• Juniper

Thoughts:
It looks like even though the commonly required education states "BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience" plus a CCNP, it seems you need more than just the CCNP in Routing and Switching. 


Here's a quick overview of some CCNP certification exams:
CCNP: ROUTE, SWITCH, TSHOOT
CCIP: ROUTE, BGP, QoS, MPLS
CCNP Security: SECURE, FIREWALL, VPN, IPS
CCDP: ROUTE, SWITCH, ARCH


The common denominator for your average Network Engineer seem to correspond to the following certifications/area's of knowledge:

• CCNP, CCIP, CCNP Security
• LPIC-1 or LPIC-2
• A scripting language (Perl/PHP/Python)
• with possibly: CCNA Voice, CCNA Wireless and CCDA/CCDP
• Load balancers (F5)

+ other various knowledge that your expected to know (e.g. Office skills, creating network diagrams, soft skills)