Moderator-Julie: Welcome to today's chat. Our guest is author and Cisco trainer Wendell Odom. His books include titles on QoS, CCIE R/S, as well as several titles related to CCNA certification, including the September 2007 book CCNA Official Exam Certification Library (CCNA Exam 640-802). Wendell also writes the popular Cisco Cert Zone blog on Network World's Cisco Subnet.

Wendell_Odom: Good to be here. Let's get some questions from the attendees. 

Moderator-Keith: While Wendell types the answer to the first question, here's a pre-submitted one. When will the self-study books be released for the new ICND 1 and ICND 2? 

Wendell_Odom: You mean the CCNA books that I don’t get paid for? ;-) Seriously, I asked the Cisco Press editor that I work with about it recently, and they said these books are planned for December (ICND1) and March '08 (ICND2). For anyone else out there that doesn’t know, if it’s got “Exam Certification Guide” in the title, it’s original material written for Cisco Press. If the title lists “Self Study Guide,” it’s Cisco’s authorized course content, edited (book-ified if you will) so that it reads more like a book. But my "Exam Cert Guides" have been out for a few months now.

Johnson2448: Will certification help me? I have five years IT experience, but not in networking. I like networking and I want to go to this IT field. But employers want experience and you can get experience when you work. How can I solve this vicious circle? 

Wendell_Odom: Well, you should take this as just one opinion, and seek others.  I’m pretty good at helping you get some Cisco certs, but I don’t spend any time examining the job market. In my opinion Cisco certs help for a couple of reasons. Frankly, if I was hiring someone to work with Cisco gear, and they hadn’t at least taken the time to get their CCNA (or maybe today the CCENT, which is a new less-strenuous cert), then I’d wonder if it was worth the time to bother looking at the resume. Secondly, Cisco partners (Cisco moves over 90% of its product sales through partners) need a certain number of certified engineers, so there’s financial value in a Cisco cert if you want to pursue jobs at these companies. But boy, if I could solve the job experience/get-the-job issue, I might be the most popular person on the planet – don’t really have any unique suggestions there. Well, maybe one – read these design docs. These documents show Cisco’s best practices for a variety of technical areas, so it’s a good way to learn what’s really happening in real networks – even if you don’t get hands on. 

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