What It’s Like Being a Woman Network Engineer

Our Manager of Training & Enablement, Elizabeth Yackley, sat down with the instructor of our free Women in Tech Network Programming & Automation Bootcamp, Elizabeth Abraham, to discuss Elizabeth A.’s experience as a woman in network engineering, her thoughts on how we can help women succeed in a very male-dominated industry, and what it was like teaching an all-women course this past March.

Elizabeth Abraham currently teaches Network Automation with Python & Ansible for Network to Code. She also teaches numerous courses as a Cisco Devnet Professional Program Instructor, and has been recognized by Credly as an Instructor with 1,000 Students Reached and 100 Courses Delivered. She was most recently recognized by Cisco with an Instructor Excellence Award for achieving a 4.8 or above in the annual average “CCSI” score in customer satisfaction surveys in 2021.

An Interview with NTC instructor Elizabeth Abraham

Q: Was this the first time you’ve taught a class of all women engineers? What was that like in relation to all of the previous courses you’ve taught? What were some of the highlights from teaching the course this past month? Was it more meaningful and impactful to teach women in tech like yourself?

A: Yes, it was a pretty unique experience for me as I have never taught an all-women class in the 25 years I have been teaching!

Reflecting back, I thought there was more camaraderie, and I was able to connect better. In addition, the students were very detail-oriented, and they carefully followed instructions throughout the course, especially using the lab guide. That kind of skill really sits well in programming/coding in general, and because of this, I felt the class was especially impactful.

Most in the class were quite interactive and spurred on effective discussions, and encouraged me to dive deeper, so to speak.

Q: Could you take me through your career path (education and jobs/positions) that led you to your career as an instructor in network engineering and automation? What kind of struggles did you face over that time?

A: Well, during my early school years, understanding mathematics came quite naturally; this seemed to serve me well when logical thinking was required. Therefore, I chose to pursue Engineering in Electronics even though it was not considered a women’s line of work back then.

After graduating as an Electronics and Communication engineer (more to do with designing Integrated Chips/ASICs) from India, I moved to the Middle East as my family was there. However, opportunities there were even more limited for women engineers!

In my pursuit of an engineering job, I applied for a position with a technology firm; however, I ended up volunteering to learn and teach Excel, which got me some recognition within the company. (This was in the early 90s, LANs were making inroads into the old legacy stand-alone computer systems.)

At the company, the engineers seemed to have a hard time figuring out these new systems called Novell Netware. I was able to read the documentation and successfully install and troubleshoot quite fast… which started my journey into network engineering, eventually providing Microsoft and Cisco solutions. However, women were not hired, nor was it deemed safe for networking jobs on-site! Hence I moved to teach Novell, Microsoft MCSE, Cisco, etc.

For the last 20+ years, my sole focus has been teaching and implementing Cisco solutions. I have worked on different product lines of Cisco: Route/Switch, Security, VoIP/Collaboration, Datacenter, and finally ventured into Network Automation. My taste for programming/coding seems to be a good skill set for Network Automation.

As for the struggles I’ve experienced, it was a very difficult period, especially during that time and location. IT workplaces were almost exclusively male-oriented. Be it in a class environment or on-site, women were not taken seriously and not expected to be there at all.

Resources were very hard to get to learn networking; expensive hardware and software were just not available outside the production environment! There were no virtual or remote environments to work on.

Class screenshot from the March 2022 Women in Tech Network Automation Bootcamp

Q: As we know, there are fewer women in network engineering than in other tech industries. What are the ways you think we can shift those percentages to increase the number of women in this industry?

A: I think this is because of the physical requirements that used to be a main part of the job when women weren’t supposed to take jobs like that: checking cabling, sometimes moving equipment, unfriendly hours, and a generally male-dominated environment have been a deterrent in the past … things have changed a lot over the recent years.

Ways I think we can increase the number of women engineers in the industry:

• Promote a more woman-friendly workspace
• Same pay scales as men for the same position
• Acquire an in-depth understanding of TCP/IP and OSI model

And most networks/equipment are becoming very “smart”; therefore, these can be worked upon remotely, and thus there is very little need to be physically at the location or NOC.

Virtual machines for every type of network device enable women to work on them as and when needed and improve their skillset.

The ability to initialize the required virtual machines in a lab environment outside of business hours encourages women to consider this field even more.

And, of course, gaining programming skills, like the skills acquired in our 5-day Bootcamp, are very helpful to push women forward into the field of Network Automation.

Q: What advice would you give to women in technology, specifically network engineering, to grow and progress in their careers?

A: These are my main points of advice:

• Develop programming skills
• Stay ahead of the latest technologies and have multiple certifications

Q: With all of your past experience, all of the courses and students you’ve taught, what are you the most proud of?

A: To sum up, I think my perseverance and not giving up the career I chose is what I’m most proud of. It was an incredibly tough journey, at least for the first 10 years, with many hurdles along the way. There were a number of times when I thought of changing course because it felt so unfair and discouraging as things were stacked up against me for being a woman, even though I was demonstrably better in my deep level of knowledge of networks and how they function.

The upshot, though, was that I was determined to enhance my knowledge of networks more than anyone would expect! So now, when I am teaching these classes, I can go into very minute details and break it down such that the students benefit immensely within a short duration. For more than a decade now, most students have told me how much they learned and enjoyed the class! We had such great feedback from the all-women class too. The glowing evaluations that I read from the students give me immense satisfaction, and I feel it was all worth it.