Cisco emphasises the importance of networking professionals to stay ahead of the increasing number of internal and external security breaches. About 64 per cent of respondents said security and risk management will be the networking skills in greatest demand in the coming three to five years.

About fifty per cent expect more companies to adopt unified communications leading to increased collaboration in the workforce. Thirty per cent of those surveyed expect that over the next five years, CIOs will especially focus on accommodating the needs of a highly collaborative, global workforce.

Real-time video solutions such as Cisco TelePresence will be one of the top green initiatives affecting networks and network engineers, according to 52 per cent of the respondents.

"CCIE holders have established a reputation for leading the networking industry in deep technical networking knowledge and are typically deployed into the most technically challenging network assignments," said Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, general manager, Learning@Cisco. "As a result, they have an unparalleled depth of knowledge and experience."