What Next after CCNA?

Career Advice (gulp!) about Your Next Step

I started out today intending to write about CCNA Security - and ended up giving career advice. Which I usually avoid like the plague. And which I think is dangerous to even bring up. But the process got me thinking about a wide range of topics, and I thought it might be helpful to some of you. I also think that a lot of folks that read this blog regularly can help those at the just-passing-CCNA stage as well. To sum it up, today's post boils down to this: Where next after CCNA? And how to choose?

First off, I am not a career counselor; I've seldom hired anyone, and have no clue as to hard numbers on hiring in different networking disciplines. But like anyone else, I do have a lot of opinions about how to develop a career in networking, so I can offer some thoughts, and encourage some discussion, on topics that I've been around a while.

So, knowing my own limitations, here's where I'll pick up the story: You've just passed CCNA, and you think you want more Cisco skills and certifications to go with them. Here are some suggestions of where to go from there.

Suggestion 1: Pick your area of specialty within the networking world. Take time now to try and figure out which part of networking seems most interesting, most exciting, most appealing to you. While we all can (and should) think about which technology areas helps you get the best jobs/career, I'm a big believer that it's just as important to pick something that you find really interesting. Personally, I started out thinking I'd be an Industrial Engineer, swearing I'd even avoid computing, and ended up loving IT, particularly networking. But that took time, thought, experience, and some (thankfully short) false starts. (Nothing like using your free electives in college on such thrillers as engineering statics and dynamics. At least I avoided deformable bodies.)

Suggestion 2: Next, after CCNA, invest one more cert exam's worth of prep, reading, etc into the specialty area you chose. Optimally, work on such things in your job. If not, at least study up, but do more than just pass the test. Read the best online industry magazines; talk it up with others who work on such things; anything to get going. Another anecdote: after I decided to ditch engineering and move on to Comp Sci in college, I spent an hour a day reading back issues of Byte Magazine for about a year, a process that helped me formulate a better idea of where to specialize.

Suggestion 3: After suggestion 2 is finished, then make your decision about going deep or going wide.   Throughout this year, I've blogged a few times about the whole deep vs. wide issue. Those watching the IT job markets show data that means the candidate with broader skills may be more appealing today to hiring managers, at least according to some studies I had seen at Network World. We've discussed in this blog such topics as whether multiple CCNAs are better than 1 CCxP, and whether multiple CCxP's are better than 1 CCIE (here and here). Those surveys showed some support for both opinions on each question. But I think many people should test the waters a bit, and figure out whether a particular discipline is interesting first. If you found that you just love your chosen specialty, maybe go deep. If you find you're still pretty interested in other specialties, maybe go wide for another CCNA or two first.

So, what specialties could you choose from to stay in the Cisco cert space? Well, you can start with a look around www.cisco.com/go/certifications. When you boil it all away, here are the general categories:

• Route/switch
• Network Design
• Security
• Voice
• Wireless
• Data Center

Of these, the middle 4 have Associate level certifications: CCDA, CCNA Security, CCNA Voice, and CCNA Wireless, respectively. The age-old CCNA serves the role of CCNA Route/switch. Finally, Cisco does not have a convenient Data Center technology introductory cert today (includes storage, Nexus switches, virtualization, and the like), but Cisco is paying a lot of attention to that space.

Now, my plea to the masses. For those of you who have specialized, why did you pick that area? For those of you that picked an area, and didn't like it, what were the negatives? Help the masses of CCNA folks getting into the CCNA game. Here's a sampling of reasons I can see:

Security: Great for FBI agent types. You think about how to use constructive things to cause trouble, and find ways to prevent it. Definite cool factor, definite challenge, always changing.

Voice: Like Route/switch in the amount of protocols, complexity, and importance, but you get a little more face time with end users, because you typically care more about the end-user devices (IP phones) than a route/switch person.

Wireless: Great for those who like getting out of the office more, especially with the challenges of site surveys, coverage, and capacity planning.

Data Center: Convergence of varied technologies/vendors always presents a career opportunity, and the data center space converges storage, servers, and network. (older examples: convergence of layer 3 protocols in the 1990's; SNA and IP later 1990's; voice/data early 2000's;)

Route/switch: mature, but big, complex, everyone has it, and vital to every company in the world. And maybe you could get a chance to work with IPv4 to IPv6 migration if/when it ever happens.

OK, tell me your thoughts, and help us all! Thanks...

Wendell

• Careers
• Cisco
• CCENT
• CCNA
• ccna specialization
• CCNP
• Cisco Press
• Wendell Odom