“We’re seeing an increased interest in how people take teams, work with their engineers, build towards these automation and software skill sets, and create the engineer of the future,” says Mandy Whaley, Sr. Director, DevNet & Certifications at Cisco. “What we see at Cisco is that the most successful teams and the most successful companies are building teams with this combined skill set of infrastructure skills and software and automation skills.”

“I lead our DevNet and technical community and certifications team for Cisco,” says Whaley. “This includes everything about helping developers use our APIs. We do a lot of work on the paths that you can take to build the skills to learn about Cisco technology, to learn about software skills, to learn about automation, and then prove and test those skills by earning some certifications.”

Mandy Whaley, Sr. Director, DevNet & Certifications at Cisco, says that the engineer of the future combines infrastructure, software, and automation skills:

How To Be An Engineer Of The Future

I come from a software development background. I’m working with a lot of DevOps, network engineering teams, infrastructure engineering teams, and we’re really looking at how all these skill sets have been evolving over time. What we see at Cisco is that the most successful teams and the most successful companies are building teams with this combined skill set of infrastructure skills and software and automation skills. Whether those skill sets are combined in one person or combined within a team of engineers who have specialties, that’s what it really takes to succeed with the scale, the speed, the agility, and the distributed nature of applications that we’re seeing today.

We’ve really seen this come into effect with COVID and the way that companies have had to respond really quickly. Automation came to the forefront as being very important. Companies that had at least a start on those skill sets have been able to respond more quickly. Now we’re seeing an increased interest in how people take teams, work with their engineers, build towards these automation and software skill sets, and create the engineer of the future.

New Job Roles Are Emerging

Part of that has a lot to do with new job roles that are coming out of that. These business drivers of speed and agility and scale are driving things like the need for CI/CD pipeline for more than just your software, even for your networks, for your infrastructure. Out of that are these new job roles emerging, things like a Network Automation Engineer or DevSecOps Engineer, bringing security strongly into your DevOps flow.

That’s part of what we’re learning from the DevNet community and what we’re working with the DevNet community on is how people are building the skills to go after those new job roles. There are a lot of opportunities and a lot of fun stuff to learn.