Essential Functions

The purpose of the essential functions list is to allow prospective students who are considering a career to be informed of the physical, emotional, and psychological demands related to training and employment in a field of study. These lists are provided to allow prospective students to make informed career choices by providing them with a summary of the physical abilities and personality traits that are generally required for the successful completion of a curriculum and result in employment in their field of study after graduation. Students in the Networking Specialist programs must be able to perform the following essential functions:

• Diagnose hardware and software problems and replace defective components.
• Perform data backups and disaster recovery operations.
• Maintain, update, and administer computer networks and related computing environments, including computer hardware, systems software, applications software, network access, file security, printers, and other peripherals connected to a network.
• Plan, coordinate, and implement network security measures in order to protect data, software, and hardware.
• Perform routine network startup and shutdown procedures and maintain control records.
• Pull, terminate, and troubleshoot Ethernet cabling between all networked devices, including hubs, routers, end-user computers, and printers.
• Design, configure, and test computer hardware, networking software, and operating system software.
• Recommend changes to improve systems and network configurations and determine hardware or software requirements related to such changes.
• Provide support to network users.
• Confer and troubleshoot with users to solve existing system problems.
• Monitor network performance in order to recommend whether adjustments need to be made and to recommend where changes will need to be made in the future.
• Deploy new and used computers to network users.
• Have sufficient manual dexterity to work with the fingers.
• Have normal vision with or without corrective lenses.
• Be able to exert up to 25 pounds of force occasionally.
• Perform sedentary physical activities and perform non-strenuous daily activities of an administrative nature.
• Have the ability to read, analyze, and interpret general business periodicals, professional journals, technical procedures, or government regulations.
• Have the ability to write information and respond to questions from groups of managers, clients, customers, and the general public.
• Have the ability to solve practical problems and deal with a variety of concrete variables in situations where only limited standardization exists.
• Have the ability to interpret a variety of instructions furnished in written, oral diagram, or schedule form.
• Have the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide in all units of measure using whole numbers, common fractions, and decimals.
• Have the ability to compute rates, ratio, and percent and to draw and interpret bar graphs.
• Be able to tolerate moderate noise.