Regarding CCNA Routing & Switching certification.

[chandra_rc16]

Hi,

Benefits of CCNA Routing & Switching Certifications ?

What are the companies that will look for the certifiied candidates ?

How will this certification enhance my career and as well as pay ?

Can i consider this certfication just like our university certificates ?

What type of recognization we will have with the help of this certification?

Please input all of your views. I'm just in a confused state and getting all of these quesiton in my mind.

Regards,

Chandu

[chandra_rc16]

Please put your thougths.

[Sandeep Choudhary]

HI Chandu,

NO body can give u clear answer

1. Benefits of CCNA routing and Switching Certification

• Knowledge
• Career Advancements
• Salary Increment
• Stepping stone for many other certifications
• Kick-start your Networking career
• main point is to get ur Personal Satisfaction

2, Every companies have ther IT department u can find jobs as N/w Admin, system admin...

3. CCNA Certification increases your chances of promotion. You could expect to move up in the hierarchy of your organization.(Its also depend on your knowledge.....)

4. Yes or No (CCNA is one of the most vouched and valued IT certification through out the world. If u can finish this certificates in your unversity time then its ice on cake, u can enter CCNA as your certification in ur resume.)

5. So from the day you get certified till the next three years you would be legally and ethically right to use CCNA in your resume as well as in your business card. Apart from this you will get a CCNA card, certificate and letter from Cisco validating your achievement.

Hope my answer helps.

Regards

[Jon Marshall]

Chandu

Why don't you look on job websites and see how many jobs are asking for these certificates ? That would give you a good idea of how in demand they are and what type of companies there are.

They have some similarities with University degrees in terms of study etc. but they are not equivalent in terms of networking jobs. For example i have a degree in Philosophy and Politics which has been absolutely no help in terms of my network career. Some people argue that  having a University degree shows the capability of studying and learning and to an extent they are right. But i have to say i have put a lot more effort into studying networking than i ever did at University.

In more general terms i have found here in the UK that if you choose a networking career you tend to be more restricted as to where you can work. For example, most companies use Windows and so you get a wider choice in where you want to work. However a lot of companies are too small to have a dedicated network person so you end up working for larger companies which means the big cities generally or close to them. In the UK London has so many more Cisco jobs than anywhere else in the country and London is expensive to live, even in the surrounding areas.

Certifications mean you have to learn and if you want to progress that is the way to do it. It's not going to hurt doing certifications if you have decided you want a career in networking. You need experience as well but it's a catch 22 so if you want to get that first step a certification may be what gets it you.

Having said all that, i should probably say i have no certifications at all. I started off as a Unix sysadmin and found the networking side the most interesting and was lucky enough to have the contacts to move into a networking job and once you are in it is much easier to find other jobs. So certifications are not the be all and end all but i still think they can be useful in getting you the interview for some companies.

Finally i should say i am not disrespecting any people with certifications as they require a lot of time and study especially the CCIE level exams and i sincerely doubt i would be able to achieve that level of expertise.

Jon

[chandra_rc16]

Actually i was bit confused because i'm planning to do my Masters in Networking. (M.Sc Networking)...... Since i'm doing masters in that field.. how come would certification like CCNA, CCNP and CCIE useful for me.

Regards,

Chandu

[Marvin Rhoads]

The CCNA R/S (and CCNP etc.) certification is valuable in addition to your university degree because it has a goal of imparting information that Cisco has found to be most useful in administering a network.

Your MS degree may teach you the mathematical algorithms necessary for computing a spanning-tree. The Cisco certification will teach you how to implement and troubleshoot it on a Cisco switch-based network. I'd like my network admin to know the latter if I had to choose just one.

[glen.grant]

  Also keep in mind if you get your cerification , you have to retest every 3 years to hold that cert or start an upper level certification or you lose the certification. .   It gets to be quite a chore on top of your regular workload.

[devils_advocate · Accepted solution]

Benefits of CCNA Routing & Switching Certifications ?

The Cisco certifications tend to hold a good weight in the IT industry as they are both theory and practical based, i.e not only do you have to be able to memorise the theory, you also have to be able to put it into the practice for the exams with the simulation questions.

There are a lot of people who have a CCNA so if you can step up and achieve the CCNP, it will hold even more weight.

What are the companies that will look for the certifiied candidates ?

I am unsure where you are based in the world but in the UK you only have to look at the huge number of job websites which advertise Network Engineer and Network Admin jobs, almost all of which have CCNA as a basic requirement. To be honest, you will find that most jobs in the UK require knowledge to CCNP level with some of which requiring the certification as a minumum.

How will this certification enhance my career and as well as pay ?

This really does depend on what you are doing at the moment and where you hope your career to go. If you want a career in Networking then the CCNA is the way to start off. I live near London and the average pay for a Network Engineer seems to be anything from £30k to £80k depending on experience.

If you currently work and are happy at your job, will getting a CCNA help you? Maybe not but if you want to progress your career in Networking then its a requirement in my opinion and as you progress your career, your pay should follow suit. Pay tends to increase with experience from what I have seen. You are not going to walk into a £60k Senior Network Engineer role with a CCNA certificat and no experience, the world doesn't work like that. Obtaining a CCNA will get you a start in networking, once you have 3-5 years experience working with a range of Cisco kit and being part of projects etc, you should have the foundations of a good career in the industry. From here you could work your way up the ladder and your salary should increase in line.

Can i consider this certfication just like our university certificates ?

Not really, a University Degree tends to be fairly varied. A CCNA Routing and Switching certification is more focussed and will help in your IT career. In fact, even if you didn't want to work in Networking, having a CCNA will help most IT careers. Almost everything runs across a Network these days so having an understanding of Routing and Switching is invaluable in my opinion. I work for an AV/IT company and pretty much all the AV kit is controlled across the LAN/WAN so the AV guys having a basic understanding of Networking is a requirement.

What type of recognization we will have with the help of this certification?

Most medium to large size companies likely use Cisco Kit. Cisco is the industry leader in Networking. Having a CCNA will give you industry recognition. A CCNP even more so.

Hope this helps!

[Marvin Rhoads]

Excellent writeup, DA. Endorsed!

[Jon Marshall]

i agree it is an excellent write up but have to take issue with one point -

If you currently work and are happy at your job, will getting a CCNA help you? Maybe not but if you want to progress your career in Networking then its a requirement in my opinion

Some people are just not suited to certifications and to say you have to have them could discourage them. I have had a decent career in networking without pursuing the certification track and i am sure others have too. Most jobs do ask for CCNA/CCNP or equivalent experience so it's not essential you have the certification.

And having a cert does not mean you are at a certain level, at least in my experience of interviewing people. I may be misinterpreting Marvin's point (apologies if i am) but -

Your MS degree may teach you the mathematical algorithms necessary for computing a spanning-tree. The Cisco certification will teach you how to implement and troubleshoot it on a Cisco switch-based network. I'd like my network admin to know the latter if I had to choose just one.

So would i, but i wouldn't assume that because they had a certification they knew how to do it.

I'm not anti certification at all, but to say you have to have them seems a bit extreme to me.

Jon

[Marvin Rhoads]

We're in agreement, Jon.

I managed the first 30 years of my network engineering career quite well without any certifications. I have successfully done the full lifecycle of work (planning through retirement phases) for networks supporting as many as 30,000 end users.

It's only in the past couple of years working for a Cisco partner that I picked up a couple of certs. I did have a BS and MS degree along the way, but neither in networking per se (BS Electronics Engineering Technology at the start of my career and MS Systems Engineering 10 years later).

So I don't assume that certification or lack thereof (likewise with a degree) proves anything by itself. We have interviewed CCIE holders (both long time and newly minted) for a network engineering job and decided to pass on making an offer. We have also hired engineers without any certification for six figure salaries (US$). I have also fired an engineer with an MS in Computer Science because of his inability to perform basic programming tasks.

And yes there are brain dumps out there and CCIEs who know all the theory but can't resist using every obscure IOS trick they learned to make a customer's network unnecessarily complex just because they can. Still, I have found personally that those are the exception and not the rule.

That said, I found that working through the CCNA R/S and CCNA Security (and I'm now working through the CCNP Security) was helpful to me to refresh my knowledge and fill in some gaps on topics that for whatever reasons I hadn't had a need to learn before. I believe the programs are well-designed and a decent (but not the sole nor by any means always an) indicator of knowledge.

[Jon Marshall]

Marvin

Thanks for the response. I agree with everything you say and was not trying to devalue the usefulness of certs at all.  I just took exception to the "requirement" part.

I think part of the problem is that i started off in unix and some of those guys were probably the smartest people i have ever worked with and they didn't have a certification among them. Ironically, in those days, if you had a unix certification  it was generally seen as a sign you had no experience with actually using it.

How times have changed

Jon

[Marvin Rhoads]

jon.marshall wrote:
... if you had a unix certification  it was generally seen as a sign you had no experience with actually using it.

Laughed out loud - I hear you on that one. I think we've all known "that guy".

[John Blakley]

I can throw my two cents in as well

I believe when certifications were first introduced, it was a way for employers to "know" they are interviewing with someone who has experience in the field that their certification was in. In the early 90s, I remember seeing so many people drop out of school because bootcamps promised them they would make more money in six weeks of training than they would with a four year degree. Then employers started to ask for four-year degrees along with certifications. And finally, four-year degrees, certifications, and experience. I believe this is partly to blame for the big boom in online education....but, I digress.

I agree with everyone else on here about certifications are not necessary. But, I do believe they help. If a potential employer is looking through resumes and they come across yours, a CCNA on your resume would have you stand out quicker than a person with a four-year degree in MIS. Why do I believe that? Because, as devils_advocate mentioned, CCNA is focused, and it's assumed that if you put the time/effort into that certification, then you obviously know what path you're going to go down. The MIS degree is more broad, and an employer, from that degree, may not know what your focuses are on.

Personally, I would guard against one thing as I've run into this many times in my own career. Certification paths require you to takes tests that are in a track. Sometimes, those tracks have tests on subjects that you may never come across in the real world. That being said, you may apply for a position someone could be advertising for only to find out that it's heavily focused on the area of your certification that you've never had real experience in. For example, I had my MCSE back in the 90s. My "finishing" exam was Exchange 5.0. I was a consultant that managed other peoples networks and was basically a "jack of all trades" if you will. The problem was that I didn't have any real experience with Exchange until one client, a quite large one, called in needing help. The company I worked for stated that they had a certified Exchange administrator on staff and I could be out there pretty quick. Long story short, it was Exchange 2000 and they were two very different beasts. It took me quite a while to figure out what the issue was, but long story short, I didn't have enough real world experience with something that I was certified in. I'm pretty sure all of us at one time in this industry has experienced being in these uncomfortable situations at one point or another....especially if you're going the certification route.

I also believe that the certification tracks are a "cover all bases" route. I think vendors that design these tests are designed to build on your knowledge from the ground up, and eventually everything will come into full circle by the time you're certified in whatever path you choose. This is why you are required to have a valid CCNA before you can attempt other Cisco tracks (with the exception of CCIE (no prerequisite is required)).

I completely agree with Jon as well. Sometimes certifications are more for the holder of the cert than the company they're wanting to work for. The company may look at it as "awww that's nice", but it will help you get in the door. I would look at it as more of a personal goal and take the knowledge that you get from that and build on it. If you like it, it's well worth doing!

HTH,
John

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[NETWORK_ZEAL]

The CCNA Routing and Switching needs ICND1(100-105) and ICND2(200-105) materials. But we can also prepare for 200-125 CCNA.

Should we prefer the materials separately for ICND1 and ICND2 or the merged content of 200-125 CCNA?
Are the exams conducted separately as ICND1 and ICND2?
Does it include only theory? Or includes lab exam too?

Please provide more information on this.