Even though many of our graduates will have progressed in their careers since completing a case study, they are still of interest to students who wish to gain an understanding of the world of work.

Maintaining the network for both office and data centre facilities that support the business.

Managing the deployment of WAN and LAN connectivity for new offices. Troubleshooting faults in existing offices. Monitoring and resolving faults in the network. Designing improvements in performance and reliability of existing infrastructure.

I enjoy keeping up with the latest developments in network security. It's a constant battle between those of us interested in securing business assets, and those who would like to compromise them.

The nature of the role means that many of the major changes have to be made when the rest of the business is in downtime (so evenings and weekends).

It's an area of work which will be in demand for many years to come as networks become more and more important for so many aspects of our lives. Most enterprise businesses will require network engineers, regardless of what the primary business function may be. This means that there are roles available in many geographic locations, rather than being primarily London and the South East.

I use the logical thinking skills I learnt at University, and the practical vocational skills learnt on the job and in various training courses taken since starting my career.

After leaving University I tried to find a graduate role in an IT position in Sheffield for three months, but was unable to find anything suitable. After expanding my search nationwide, I was able to secure a position in Bracknell, Berkshire. I worked as an Engineering Services Engineer for 5 years, in a company providing a telecommunications platform in the cloud. In this position I specialised in networking, as I saw it as a more transferable skill than focusing on the proprietary software the company used. During my time here, I took qualifications in Genband SBCs, Oracle SBCs and Cisco networking.

After 5 years in this role, I moved on to a much larger company, in a purely network engineering role based in Winnersh, but with offices around the world.

Since most of my work revolves around managing network devices remotely, I hope to move into a home-working role within the same company. This will allow me to move back closer to my family in Yorkshire. I plan to become certified on a wider range of vendor devices such as Checkpoint and Silverpeak.

Really the most important part of network engineering is just experience. It's tough to go straight from University to a network engineer role. The easier way to do it is start in a junior IT support role, and steer your learning towards networking. There are plenty of online resources to help your learning, and virtual network software you can use to practice building networks.