I'm back! The beach was great - high 80's every day, beautiful weather, plenty of sun - just what the doctor ordered. But I returned to a surprise about one of the surveys I left in the previous posting - that around 50% of the folks that responded as "pursuing CCNP" said that less than 25% of their current job required them to work on routers and switches.

Frankly, the stats surprised me. Maybe it shouldn't have surprised me, and maybe everyone's ahead of me on this observation. So, today I'm going to make a few guesses about CCNP and job progressions, and ask all of you to give me your ideas regarding your current and hopefully future job roles.

Certainly, people pursuing CCNA have jobs that require either no or very little work with routers and switches - CCNA-level skills are usually a minimum requirement to get the job in the first place.

So, if I take this theory to the next step, let's say you get CCNA, and want to have a job that is centered on the technologies in one of the Cisco Professional level tracks, eg routing/switching for the CCNP. How many CCNP tests do you have to pass before someone will hire you into the router/switch-centric jobs? (I meant that as a rhetorical question, but feel free to answer!) Maybe what we're seeing in this little survey, with a full ¾ of respondents having less than 50% job content on routers/switches, is that CCNP is a minimum requirement to get a router/switch-centric job.

Clearly, the issue of "getting the job" has a lot more to do with skills/experience than with certs (as it should in my opinion). We've had several discussions in this blog in the past about the value of certs, and motivations, with the primary reasons being because of the value of the certs to Cisco partners and the value of certs for an individual's resume'. I wonder how many of you are motivated to get CCNP because you work at a Cisco partner and it helps in the perception game if you also have CCNP by your name...

Finally, maybe you don't really want a router/switch-centric job - maybe CCNP is just something to round out the resume', and to build skills you do need for your job - but you're not trying to get away from something else?

So, I have two primary questions, and then I promise next post I'll get back to the CCNP lab topic. The questions are:

1) If router/switch work isn't your primary job role today, what is that primary role? I'm curious about current work for those pursuing CCNP, and I think others would be as well.

2) Why do you think such a high percentage of survey respondents spend less than half their time on routers/switches? Did I get close at all here?

Thanks folks!