Opinion: Observations on CCNP Changes and New CCIE SP Ops

I have just fin­ished read­ing Wendell Odom’s post at Network World about the changes to the CCNP cer­ti­fic­a­tion announced today. Wendell is prob­ably the goto per­son out­side of Cisco so his excel­lent post is worth read­ing before you read the rest of this.

You back ? Good.

Observations

Wendell points out that this new CCNP means a deep­en­ing of edu­ca­tion and, impli­citly, skills in the core Routing and Switching Topics at the expense of other top­ics such as wire­less, mul­tic­ast, QoS and some applic­a­tion top­ics. It seems that clear that Cisco is recog­nising the industry trend to spe­cial­iz­a­tion. That is, a CCNP is not a good found­a­tion for imple­ment­ing MPLS or Wireless net­works. You should be study­ing and tak­ing exams in these top­ics so that you have the depth of know­ledge needed to work on those technologies.

This reflects the fact that many areas of net­work­ing require deep skills. Being able to route and switch is not a suf­fi­cient skill set to oper­ate a Wireless ISP, as I’m sure you can agree.

You won’t have just one certification

If you haven’t real­ised already, the spe­cial­isa­tion of the CCNP on just net­work­ing means that you need to con­sider hav­ing more than one cer­ti­fic­a­tion. Most com­pan­ies will want your core skills in rout­ing and switch­ing in addi­tion to a spe­cific focus in the area that you work in. Thus, if you are a Wireless Engineer you will need a Wireless cer­ti­fic­ate, and an MPLS engin­eer will need a MPLS Certificate.

Just like other careers, the cer­ti­fic­ate only val­id­ates the per­sons’ know­ledge in the spe­cific area. Thus a plumber is cer­ti­fied for plumb­ing, the gas fit­ter is cer­ti­fied for gas, and the elec­tri­cian is cer­ti­fied in elec­tri­city. In some sense, the Cisco cer­ti­fic­a­tions are align­ing in this direction.

You should note that this ana­logy works pretty well. Just because you are a cer­ti­fied elec­tri­cian doesn’t mean you don’t know some plumb­ing or gas know­ledge. And a bright and motiv­ated elec­tri­cian may have the tools and learned enough to make a pretty good plumber, but you aren’t proven to have those skills. You wouldn’t nor­mally hire an elec­tri­cian to put the plumb­ing into your house would you ?

Lifelong Study — don’t take shortcuts

It’s also time to think of Cisco Certifications as Lifelong Study. You don’t pass them once. You have to take those exams every two or three years to main­tain your status for the rest of your work­ing life.

I’ll say it again, the rest of your work­ing life.

That means is you take short­cuts today like cram­ming, or skim­ming over the hard parts, then you will need the know­ledge next time. Or the time after that.

This also means tak­ing the oppor­tun­ity, or plan­ning to re-​​read those books everytime you have a pro­ject. Or set­ting aside some time every three months to review a sec­tion such OSPF, or Spanning Tree. Especially if you don’t use that skill everyday.

CCIE Service Providers Operations

Cisco also announced the CCIE Service Provider Operations today. This also appears to focus a spe­cific skill­set, that is, troubleshoot­ing MPLS net­works for Service Provider. This is a very dif­fer­ent skill­set from Designing Networks for Service Providers which requires less depth of know­ledge and more aware­ness of the ‘width’ of technologies.

Again, this seems to show use that spe­cial­isa­tion is the future of the Cisco Certifications. By focus­ing on deep know­ledge so that oper­at­ing and troubleshoot­ing MPLS Core is enhanced.

Wrap Up

Broadly, I’m in favour of the changes. The per­sonal chal­lenge is that newly cer­ti­fied CCNP will be smarter and that means I’m going to have a work a bit harder to keep ahead. On the other hand, hav­ing someone with good know­ledge shar­ing the work load is a damn fine thing. Knowing that someone has got my back is valu­able in a big network.

I think these changes reflect the cur­rent mar­ket­place for spe­cial­isa­tion and the need for highly know­ledge­able people.

Good stuff.

PS I still hate the logo

Oh yeah the new logo for CCIE cer­ti­fic­a­tions still suck.

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