UNDERSTANDING FUNDAMENTALS IS THE TRUE SKILL IN NETWORK ENGINEERING
In our field, it is very easy to become comfortable with a single vendor. Many engineers grow confident with one specific CLI and begin to associate their knowledge with that vendor’s syntax. They can navigate Juniper, Cisco or Arista with ease, yet at the same time they often skip the effort of truly understanding how a protocol behaves or why an architecture works the way it does. The network engineer skills that actually matter are the ones that survive a vendor change.
What a Multivendor Environment Exposes
The moment an engineer steps into a multivendor environment, everything changes. They can no longer rely on muscle memory or vendor specific shortcuts. They need to understand the core ideas behind routing, switching and transport. They begin to focus on fundamentals such as how a protocol forms adjacencies, how a control plane converges or how an encapsulation behaves in a certain topology. This deeper understanding allows them to work confidently on any platform because they finally see the technology rather than the commands.
The test is simple. Ask an engineer why an OSPF adjacency is stuck in ExStart and watch whether they reason about MTU mismatches and master-slave negotiation, or start scrolling through command history looking for the incantation that worked last time. The first engineer will solve it on any vendor. The second is one syntax change away from being lost.
The Network Engineer Skills That Transfer
Across every platform we operate, the same short list of fundamentals does the heavy lifting:
Adjacency and session formation. What both sides must agree on for OSPF, IS-IS or BGP to come up, and therefore what to check when they do not.
Convergence behavior. What happens between a failure and a restored forwarding path: timers, SPF runs, BGP path selection, and where the seconds actually go.
Encapsulation logic. What headers wrap the packet in MPLS, VXLAN or GRE, what that does to MTU, and where each layer can silently drop things.
The split between control plane and forwarding plane. Which problems live in protocol state and which live in hardware programming, because they are diagnosed in completely different places.
None of these depend on a vendor. All of them decide how long an outage lasts.
How We Train for This
At ITcare we invest a great deal of time in teaching exactly these fundamentals. Our philosophy is simple. When you truly understand the basics, troubleshooting becomes easier, design choices become clearer and the CLI becomes nothing more than the way you express what you already know. Any engineer can learn a syntax by using the question mark. Only a good engineer understands what happens behind it.
That is also the logic behind how we approach certifications. When our NOC team cleared nine Juniper certifications in two months, the point was never the badges. The tracks force exactly this kind of protocol-level understanding, and the exam is just the checkpoint that proves it landed.
Master the Foundations First
To all network engineers reading this, take time to master the foundations before you dive into advanced technologies. Going deep into EVPN, VXLAN or MPLS without strong fundamentals creates gaps that eventually slow you down. The advanced technologies are compositions of the basics: EVPN is BGP carrying MAC reachability, VXLAN is encapsulation with all the MTU consequences encapsulation always has. If the foundation is solid, the advanced layer is vocabulary. If it is not, the advanced layer is memorization that collapses under the first novel failure.
Strong basics will always carry you further than any vendor specific command. At ITcare we see this every day, and we are proud to build a team that thinks in protocols, architectures and design principles, not in CLIs.
