Working Network Engineer Teaching Real-World Networking

Khizer A.

I am a Network Engineer III with 6 years of hands-on experience designing, securing, and troubleshooting enterprise networks. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from University of Houston, and my certifications include CCNA, Fortinet NSE 7 and CWNA. My daily work covers HPE Aruba switching, Cisco FTD/FMC, FortiGate firewalls, SD-WAN, Aruba ClearPass and Central, enterprise Wi-Fi, Zscaler, and cloud networking in AWS and Microsoft Azure. I also use Python, N8N and APIs to automate network operations, including a LLM with read only access to orchestrate information gather in our enviroment.

Over the past 6 years, I have trained new and junior engineers on my teams one-on-one, walking them through subnetting, VLANs, routing, and firewall policy, and I have written internal documentation and step-by-step guides for my colleagues. The people I have helped have been adults, ranging from career changers and early-career technicians to experienced colleagues preparing for certification exams.

I teach networking the way it is actually used. Instead of relying on memorization, I start with how traffic moves through a network and build each concept with diagrams and hands-on labs in Cisco Packet Tracer or GNS3, so students can configure, break, and fix things themselves. For certification students, I pair lab work with practice questions and a study plan matched to the exam objectives, and I check understanding by having students explain their reasoning back to me. For students pursuing a networking career, I also run mock technical interviews based on what employers actually ask. My goal is for every student to leave each session able to solve the problem on their own.