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If you work in a technical field, chances are you will have had to earn some vendor certifications. Personally I hold certs from Cisco, Microsoft and Red Hat, with VMware and Riverbed soon to follow. When you start doing these you tend to just go with the flow and learn what they tell you to learn – after all who are we to argue with the wisdom of the technical Gods at company x? Once you’ve done a few though you will find the odd exam where something just isn’t quite right with regards to the content and the target audience. I’m going to pick on Cisco here because I’ve done quite a few of their exam tracks (CCNA, CCNP) and am currently working on another (CCDA). This is applicable to most vendors however.

First a bit of background about Cisco exams. They are organised into three tiers, Associate, Professional and Expert, which correspond to CCxA, CCxP and CCIE tracks respectively. Each tier has different tracks, such as Routing, Security, Voice, Wireless, etc. You can see all the tracks here, and note I don’t count CCENT. The idea is that you start as an Associate in your track, move up to Professional, and if you are really hardcore finally end on Expert. The foundation for pretty much every track is the CCNA – last I checked you had to have this before you could move onto the other tracks.

So lets look at the CCNA exam. If you haven’t done any networking before its not an easy exam to pass, a lot of things are covered and it can get pretty technical. It also has the problem that it doesn’t seem to be aimed at anyone in particular, and you don’t come out of it with knowledge that you can apply to real world problems. On paper it looks great, it covers a lot of ground and all the pieces are there, but it doesn’t show you how to combine them to make something useful. This is not to be disparaging of people who’ve done the cert because it takes a lot of work, instead I speak from experience. It wasn’t until I did the CCNP and gained some real world experience that I learnt how to put the different pieces together. I don’t want to say the CCNA is a useless cert, but it’s hard to tell who the target audience is. A small business won’t need things like managed switches or routing protocols, and a medium to large one will require much more knowledge to set up than you gain in the CCNA. The sweet spot where a CCNA is useful is incredibly narrow. But thats ok because there is also a design syllabus, the CCDA. This should tell us how to pull things together and design our network right?

Not quite. To use a common phrase, I’d describe the CCDA as covering topics which are a mile wide and an inch deep. To make things even worse, almost all the topics in it are Professional level material. A large part of the exam could be seen as ‘CCNP lite’, with the rest corresponding to ‘CCSP lite’ and ‘CCVP lite’. For me this is pretty easy, I’ve done the CCNP, know a fair bit about the security side of things and just need to learn a little more voice. For a CCNA though, this is a huge expansion of what they know. I would have been massively confused if I had looked at this syllabus straight from doing my CCNA. Even worse none of the topics are covered in any great detail, so by the end of the course while they might understand what they should be doing, they have no idea how to do it. I was expecting the CCDA to be fully focused on pulling together the topics in the CCNA and expanding on them with some basic resilient designs which would suit a small to medium business. The syllabus does cover this (in very small detail), but then adds a load more advanced stuff which is totally inappropriate for the people who would potentially be sitting it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say CCNP level knowledge is necessary to do the CCDA, but I can’t see how you would put the CCDA topics into context without it.

Unfortunately you can only make these kind of observations once you are at a much higher level than the target audience by which point it is moot. Until you get there all you can do is realise that sometimes the people who set the syllabus don’t know best, and if you learn everything they say and it still doesn’t quite click it is just as likely their fault as it is yours.

Every now and then Cisco update their exam tracks, and this time its the CCNP’s turn. Personally, I think the CCNP is hands down the most useful Cisco qualification to have if you work with WAN and LAN networks on a regular basis. The CCNA is too basic to be of much practical use, and the CCIE is great if you do networks full time but today people tend to expect you to know more than one area.

If you are unfamiliar with the CCNP, the previous track consisted of four exams which can be briefly summed up as follows: BSCI (routing), BCMSN (switching), ONT (QoS + wireless), and ISCW (everything else – VPNs, DSL, MPLS, security). The new track is three exams.

The changes are very interesting – I always saw the core of this track as being routing and switching and Cisco seem to be acknowledging that with the first two exams, ROUTE and SWITCH. If you delve a bit deeper into the actual exam topics you can see that they’ve actually cut a lot of the content which isn’t routing or switching out. ROUTE looks to be basically the BSCI exam, with a very small coverage of the VPN and DSL topics from ISCW. SWITCH is the BCMSN with a bit of security. The third exam is TSHOOT, which is aligning with new CCIE track by adding a dedicated troubleshooting element.

Personally I’m 50/50 about the changes. Cisco seem to be trying to make each track very specific with no overlaps (the current CCNP has some overlap with the CCVP, CCSP and CCIP), and while I can see why they would want to do this I think it will produce less rounded engineers at the end of it. If you do the current CCNP you come out of it knowing a lot about routing and switching, and enough about everything else that you can work out most issues after a little research. Its kind of the jack of all trades qualification, which you might expect based on the acronym. With the changes it is turning more into the CCR&SP.  However I do like is the inclusion of the troubleshooting section since just setting equipment up in the first place is only the start of your job, you then have to go and support it.

Luckily I got my CCNP just last year so I’m not affected by the changes, but candidates who are halfway through theirs can either continue with the current track (until July), or substitute BSCI and BCMSN exams they have already completed for ones on the new track. More info on this here