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Im revising for my ccna exam, and christ its boring!
The worst thing is, I have to do my ccnp after that. At least its crap weather out there.
Anyone else got their ccnp, has it helped their career?
Used to have the CCNP + CCDP and was starting on the CCIP then work got that hectic that I didn't have time to revise for the re-certs and as I'm pre-sales and don't get any hands on in my job, it's design focused instead, so I had to let em lapse.
As for has it helped, probably yes as the knowledge and experience gained has allowed me to speak at a higher level with support engineers, platform design teams and provisioning engineers, suppliers, customers etc..
Big tip if you are not getting much hands on in your job then you'll probably find that you have to build up your own little network to train on. In the past this has meant buying off Ebay, scrounging recovered routers/switches etc.. However you can hire on-line practise labs OR if you can use GNS3 instead if you have access to IOS Images.
Good luck!
Yeah ta, im using gns at the moment, I use cisco's at work, in a more basic way at the mo, so I have access to all the IOS's,
Just need these quals to make more money!
I'm CCNP and CCSP. My first job was in a NOC, got ccna in first year as it was expected for the job. Then moved into the engineering dept and then got CCSP, as I was doing alot of security installs, pix, vpn, ssl accelerators etc , and to be honest the exams were OK as I was doing a lot of the stuff everyday.
Left that as I was offered a contracting job replacing the edge network at a large credit card company, and got my ccnp while I was doing this, didnt need to but thought it would help me to get another job when the contract finished.
Then got offered a job by the CC company as senior engineer and ccnp was a requirement of the job.
Its worth doing as you will be in a position to apply for better roles and a new ccnp should be able to get at least £10K more than a ccna, and a ccnp with some good experience should get min £40K + benifits/bonus etc.
Always worth getting experience though, as there is a lot of blaggers out there, we had a consultant engineer role advertised last year and there was some impressive CV's sent in, but when we got them in for a technical interview they were terrible, all had done the ccnp with p4sure/braindumps etc and it showed. Took about 4 months before we could get someone half decent.
I have noticed that the exams are getting harder and they are not cheap now either, will your employer pay for the certifications?