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 a field of study after graduation. Students entering the Networking Specialist programs must be able to perform the following essential tasks:

• Critical Thinking: Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions, or approaches to problems.
• Reading Comprehension: Understanding written sentences and paragraphs in work-related documents.
• Written Comprehension: Reading and understanding information and ideas presented in writing.
• Oral Comprehension: Listening to and understanding information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
• Complex Problem Solving: Identifying complex problems and reviewing related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions.
• Speaking: Talking to others to convey information effectively.
• Active Listening: Giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.
• Writing: Communicating effectively in writing as appropriate to the needs of the audience.
• Judgement and Decision Making: Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.
• Time Management: Managing one's own time and the time of others.
• Active Learning: Understanding the implications of new information for both current and future problem-solving and decision-making.
• Monitoring: Assessing performance of yourself, other individuals, or organizations to make improvement or take corrective action.
• Deductive Reasoning: Being able to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
• Inductive Reasoning: Being able to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions including finding relationships among seemingly unrelated events.
• Near Vision: Being able to see details at close range.
• Systems Analysis: Determining how a system should work and how changes in conditions, operations, and the environment will affect outcomes.
• Systems Evaluation: Identifying measures or indicators of system performance and the actions needed to improve or correct performance relative to the goals of the system.
• Operation Monitoring: Watching gauges, dials, or other indicators to make sure a machine is working properly.
• Programming: Writing computer programs for various purposes.
• Information Ordering: Arranging things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules, i.e., patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations.
• Category Flexibility: Generating or using different sets of rules for combining or grouping things in different ways.

Source

O*Net Online. Network and Computer Systems Administrators.