The IPv6 Skills Crisis

The adoption rate for IPv6 has picked up dramatically in the last year. That's the good news. The bad news is that the skills of operators who have to deal with the protocol are not keeping up at all. We are in a serious situation where skills do not match operational requirements.

The hard reality is that there are nowhere near enough IPv6 trainers and educators to fulfill the inevitable demand for IPv6 expertise. This should concern both the operators of networks and the businesses that use them. The knowledge requirement for IPv6 cuts across IT disciplines: Help desk, systems, storage, databases, networking, and application developers all need to know at least something about it.

The California IPv6 Task Force that I co-chair has identified education for IPv6 as one of the key roadblocks preventing adoption of the protocol.

[IPv6 will play a big part in making IoT happen. Read IoT, IPv6 Coming To The Connected Home.]

This year one of our principal goals is to improve the education situation. One way we are accomplishing this is to encourage our IPv6 colleagues to get out on the road at major conferences to talk about IPv6.

I presented Getting Serious About IPv6: Go Big or Go Home at Interop in Las Vegas earlier this year, and I'm excited Interop invited me to New York City in October to present the session IPv6 Bootcamp: Get Up To Speed Quickly.

The goal is to continue to move the ball forward for Interop attendees and help them gain some quick, tactical knowledge about IPv6. They'll understand what IPv6 is doing, why it behaves the way it does, and what options they have to control its behavior.

IPv4 has been around for a long time. There's a large body of knowledge around operating and maintaining networks that run IPv4, and many people are comfortable with the protocol. Our challenge is to get all those people to the same comfort level with IPv6.

A single session at Interop isn't enough to learn everything about IPv6, but I hope it will be your first step to gain more skills and get more comfortable with the protocol. Perhaps it will jumpstart your interest in IPv6.

Over the years I've talked to a lot of people about why they are (or aren't) deploying IPv6. One of the biggest challenges is the lack of good educational resources. So I've put together a list of IPv6 resources, including books and websites that might help you. This isn't a complete list, but it will get you started.

In the interest of full disclosure, titles with an asterisk indicate I was either an author, a technical reviewer, or involved in the book in some way. I've listed titles by publication year starting with the most recent.

Here are some links to excellent online content:

Best of luck in your IPv6 journey, and I hope to see you at Interop New York this fall.

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