How Learning IPv6 Advances Your Career

IPv6 evangelists often speak about how IPv6 is beneficial to enterprises, corporations, and governments; in other words, the employer.  We typically don’t discuss the benefits of IPv6 to the individual, in other words, the employee.

In this article, we discuss three primary reasons why you need to learn IPv6 as an IT professional.  We’ll cover how IPv6 helps you stay ahead of the curve, increases your value, and transforms your career.

 

Stay Current

You want to future-proof your career to ensure you will be gainfully employed into the future and not fall behind the pack.  You want to stay ahead of the curve, not fall behind, and avoid technological obsolescence.  There are still COBOL programmers around but learning it is not a long-term career move.

One sign that your career is stagnating is that you are often stuck working on IPv4-related projects.  Maybe you are tasked with the thankless job of IPv4-address re-addressing or constantly having to deal with the limitations of IPv4 like troubleshooting overlapping IPv4 address space.  These are the projects that represent the lost OPEX costs and the hidden costs of using IPv4.  IPv4 re-addressing projects are not valued by employers, are risky because of application impacts, and are time-consuming, requiring lots of after-hours and weekend work.

Instead, we recommend learning about IPv6 which will allow you to work on modern IT systems, thereby advancing your career and increasing your value.  You’ll find that learning something new energizes you and prevents you from stagnating with old IPv4-only technologies that might be limited and not keeping pace with industry trends.  If you feel you are proficient with IPv4 and have a solid understanding of that protocol, then you should learn the new version: IPv6.

Working on products and services that don't support IPv6, at this late date, shows that they are not under active development and may be planned for end-of-life or be discontinued.  You don’t want to work with these dead-end products that are not long for this world.

As the industry experiences “erosion of the IT middle class”, you want to be working on the emerging new technologies like software-defined automation, AI/ML projects, IoT, and cloud technologies.  You want to avoid being forced down the protocol stack working with physical hardware and an outdated protocol.  You will derive significant personal satisfaction when you are learning and working with modern technologies, such as those that support IPv6.

 

Career Advancement

As you take action to keep your skills current and sharp you want to look for ways to transform your career and continue to grow.  You must keep up with IT modernization initiatives and trends and hopefully your continuing education provides opportunities to work on cool new projects.

Large-scale enterprise IPv6-related projects are often related to innovative technologies like IoT, mobile applications, and the cloud.  IPv6 projects are high-profile projects that help the organization remain competitive, reduce operational burden, and unlock the potential of a globally unique non-overlapping IP address space.  By working on an IPv6 project at your current company, you will increase your value to your current employer.

IPv6 projects typically have executive and higher-level staff involvement.  Being part of an IPv6 project elevates your profile within your organization.  This could possibly lead to higher compensation or a promotion while working at your current employer.  However, if your company is not interested in deploying IPv6 and are intentionally delaying the inevitable, then you may need to switch companies to get IPv6 deployment experience.

 

Better Employment Opportunities

The IPv6 skillset is in demand and is a marketable skill.  It is all about the law of supply and demand.  Every enterprise will deploy IPv6 at some point, but the number of IPv6-knowledgeable IT staff today is low.

Large organizations need IPv6-knowledgeable staff and the requirement to deploy IPv6 is an inevitability.  Their current staff may not have learned IPv6, so the organization is going to try to hire IPv6 talent.  There are many IT job postings for positions, and it is remarkable how many of them mention IPv6 as one of the skills that are desirable or required.  Few other applicants possess any mentionable IPv6 experience so having that capability could put you ahead of others vying for the same job.

Having an IPv6 certification would differentiate yourself from other job applicants.  Hogg Networking offers a set of three free open-book online IPv6 certification exams.  Passing one (or all) of these exams proves your knowledge of IPv6 and shows employers that you have the requisite knowledge.