The tremendous growth of local area networks (LANs) into the organizational,
corporate, and home networks in the last 20 years has shown that there is a
need for individuals with networking experience, and that need will remain
for a long time coming. The U.S. Department of Labor forecasts an increase of
58 percent in the network and system support job market by 2016. With that
growth comes opportunities for individuals with networking knowledge to
secure their future.
There are very few instances where a business is run without a network
of some sort. Retail environments maintain inventory, report income, transfer
personnel information, and many other functions are handled within a
LAN. LAN-to-LANcommunication, secure tunneling, encryption and authentication,
and many other functions are now handled by specific nodes and
application programs that are part of the network.