Category: Certifications

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.