Everyone is supposed to get one professional freebie growing up.

If your dad was a mechanic, you probably aren’t afraid to swap out your own car battery. Heck, if you really paid attention you may be doing your own brakes in the front driveway. If your mom worked in law, then terms like plaintiff, deposition, and judgment don’t send send you scurrying for the dictionary. You still probably need to seek some counsel if you’re about to get sued.

It’s a light competence—a familiarity with the profession that lets you dovetail with your own experiences later. If you want to follow in either parent’s footsteps you have an idea of what that work tastes like already. Maybe that’s why parents are always insisting you at least try the new food. If you don’t at least try it, you won’t know if you like it.

We’ve had a pseudo nephew living with us for the passed 10 months or so. He’s one class from graduating with the rest of his high school class. He’s considering some college later but in the short term it’s a job. The opportunity is pretty limited – retail, food service, and possibly some temping somewhere. That’s when it occurred to me that I might be able to improve his options a bit.

I’ve been working with him on his soft skills since he first arrived though sometimes trying to exorcise sarcasm from a youth’s repertoire is tantamount to just that – an exorcism. He’s gotten a lot better and even though he lets it slip every now and then he’s almost immediately sorry he did. I’m still working on the finer points of etiquette a la Professionally Polished by my friend Dallas Teague-Snider (a must-read if you haven’t already).

I know a handful of IT disciplines well enough to teach them to someone else – networking, systems administration, programming, etc. I gave it a lot of thought. While the others might be a nice foothold for getting an entry-level job, I figured that networking was the right choice. Even if he didn’t really dig in and keep going with it, I could at the very least bring him up to speed enough to configure small networks and do some basic routing & switching. I’m shooting for him to pass his CCNA.

Today we talked about the basics – 10baseT networks, coaxial cable, BNC connectors, repeaters, hubs, CSMA/CD, collisions, switches, ping, and a little about NAT & DHCP. We’ll see how much stuck tomorrow. We even broke out an old 1900 switch I had laying around and set up a couple laptops on the same network.

I think we’ll move on to IPv4 addressing next, maybe. What do you think?