I've been offered the opportunity to up-skill and it partly involves gaining a CCNA qualification. I've done some general looking around online but don't get any real feeling of the kind of study that is involved. The cost will be covered for by work but I'm interested in what I've let myself into?
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CCNA, Views?
- Thread starter iKennett
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I just got my CCNA a couple weeks ago. I had a couple networking courses at college that were geared towards passing the CCNA (in fact, the CCNA was our final exam). But the textbooks we used (the official Cisco ones for the CCNA) are very well written and if you put enough effort into it, you could probably pass the exam just by reading the books and using the Cisco IOS simulator included with them to familiarize yourself with configuring Cisco gear.
As a starting point CCNA is well worth while. But make sure you know more than is required for passing the exam. There are way to many "paper" CCNA's out there.
Agreed.
Cisco does have their Cisco Academy, which is basically a week long course taught by someone who knows exactly what will be on the exam and teaches you only that, and you're basically guaranteed to pass. But you learn just enough to get by. At least that's what the instructor of my 2 semester long independent study course at college told me. By doing it on my own, I learned a bunch of stuff that wasn't on my version of the exam, and may not be in the CCNA question pool at all despite being in Cisco's official study materials. I have my doubts as to whether or not someone who went through the Academy can rattle off routing protocol administrative distances or default metrics for several different link types, do complex subnetting problems, or configure a large network with several routers, switches and various link types without making extensive use of the help features in Cisco IOS.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, and to an employer, a CCNA is a CCNA....they don't know whether you learned just enough to get by or can recite your study books verbatim. But obviously, the more you know, the better, and if you don't need to google everything or look it up in your books while on the job, then your boss will be much happier. It would benefit you greatly to learn more than "just enough to get by." Plus, if you choose to continue on, you'll be a bit more prepared for your CCNP and CCIE (aka Cisco god)