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.

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.