Category: certifications

My favorite provocateur has dreamed up another sensational story ... and even has numbers to back it up. Reverse engineering the increase in reported number of CCIEs and taking in account the estimated number of seats in Cisco's labs worldwide, he concluded that the pass rate for CCIE R/S is currently at 35% whereas in the past the rumors claimed it was only around 10%. The conclusions in the story should not surprise you ... it must be the braindumps and the devaluing of the CCIE program. Of course it's the braindumps: people like Petr Lapukhov, Jeremy Stretch, Arden Packeer, Joe Harris and tens of others (including yours truly) are dumping the contents of their gray cell matter into blogs and wikis, creating astounding amount of information that we've never got from Cisco in the past.

The CCIE preparation programs also cover an enormous amount of scenarios and variations, giving you lots of material to practice (BTW, when I was teaching CCIE preparation bootcamps 15 years ago, the pass rate of my students was over 90% as I simply forced them to configure all the possible stupidities Cisco IOS could do at that time). The tests don't have to get any easier; the participants (if the calculations are correct) are simply better prepared. Whether the increased number of CCIEs results in the perceived devaluing of the program is another question (remember: the supply/demand rules), but I am absolutely sure that people passing CCIE lab exam these days know approximately as much as those passing it two or three years ago.

Of course you could argue whether someone who did tens (or sometimes hundreds) of scenarios in his lab and then passed the CCIE test is an expert or a braindump cheater (let's wait for the first blog post that claims that), but I doubt anyone is able to remember so many recipes and apply the correct one without a profound understanding of the underlying issues.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the supportive comments to my CCIE-related post; I didn’t realize there are so many CCIEs out there that feel the same way I do. Will we change anything? We can only hope; the CCIE program is orders of magnitude smaller than the Cisco’s equipment sales.

A few of the comments also asked for my opinion on the value of CCIE certification and whether it’s worth pursuing. Obviously, the short answer is yes.

July 1st, 2008 marks another milestone in my professional career: I became an inactive CCIE. Before going into the details of why I decided not to go for the recerfitication exam (I haven't even tried to go there), let me just say that I've been working in the networking industry for 25 years and had the CCIE status for the last 13 years. I no longer see myself craving for jobs where the activity of my CCIE status would count and the "Benefits of CCIE Membership" (including the party at Cisco Live! event) are not coming close to giving me any motivation to extend the status.

However, the real reason I decided not to extend my active status lies in the process. Years ago, Cisco organized update trainings for CCIEs. Attending one of these trainings (which really added value to your knowledge) extended your status. In my opinion, an update training combined with a post-training exam would make sense. Like many other features of the program, these trainings are long gone.

Passing a written exam every two years with more-or-less the same questions is (in my personal opinion) bogus. It does not require me to grow or acquire new knowledge, it just forces me to re-read the IP multicast and IS-IS student kits we've developed. It's simply a tick in the box and I'm no longer willing to participate in this charade. To make matters worse, the tests were not exactly accurate over the years I had to take them. When I was developing (the then only) EIGRP training for internal Cisco audiences, I lost most points on EIGRP questions simply because I knew too much about the protocol. A few years ago I was faced with purely marketing questions about a newly-promoted technology that were obviously hastily added to the pool of questions. To be honest, I was told that the current test should be better that my past experiences, but I decided I will not find out how true that is. I had enough.

My recent post about a CCNP bootcamp program I was involved with generated interesting comments, most of them focusing on the question: “Does it make sense to attend a bootcamp?”

The answer depends on how you got to the stage where you want to (or need to) attain the CCxP certification. Before going into discussions on “experience” versus “knowledge retention” (potentially “aided” by brain dumps), please read The Top 10 Problems with IT Certification in 2008 article published by InformIT. My potential disagreements with this article are so minor that I will not even try to document them.

OK, now that we're on the same page, let's analyze why someone would want to pursue CCxP certification:

• To increase the salary or have better job options (as HR departments ask for people with specific set of certifications). From what I hear, this reason is more viable in US than the rest of the world (in most of Europe we can still test the technical skills of the candidates in any way we want without running the risk of being sued). Bootcamps might not be the best option for these candidates, as they tend to be priced similarly to the regular classes. Reading books or e-learning material (not to mention certain not-so-very-legitimate activities) will get you through the exams as long as they don't have the hands-on part ... and of course you'll end up having certification with zero experience;
• To learn something new and valuable resulting in a formal recognition of the effort. Don't even think about attending the bootcamps. If you're learning completely new concepts, go through the regular courses (or use e-learning combined with hands-on lab exercises). Highly intensive format of the bootcamps (after all, we're trying to squeeze almost two weeks worth of material into a single week) will fly way over your head.
• To formalize your experience ... either because you want to or because your employer needs certified head count (very common with Cisco partners trying to get better discount based on their partner status). In this case, a condensed bootcamp is usually the best option. For example, we had very successful bootcamp program a few years ago running back-to-back with the exams ... and, mind you, we used no cheating or brain dumps, the fact that the students took the exam right after the course obviously helped.

Last but definitely not least, it's worth mentioning that not all five-day courses have five days worth of content. In these cases, condensing them into bootcamps makes even more sense.