The CCIE is the hardest certification to achieve in the IT industry, but it is little known or understood in the general population. Network engineers who have passed the exam agree that it's the Rodney Dangerfield of professional exams: It gets no respect outside of IT circles.

Passing the Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) lab exam will bring you instant credibility at work, but your mother won't be bragging about it to her friends, CCIE holders say. Listing your CCIE number on your business card will give you God-like status among your peers, but it won't work as a pickup line at a bar.

"My parents are immigrants. Although their English is pretty good, they didn't realize what it means to have a CCIE," says Robert Yee, manager of network engineering with J2 Global Communications in Los Angeles. Yee passed the CCIE lab exam in May 2003 and holds CCIE #11716. "Even my sister who is an engineer, but not in the IT world, didn't understand."

Click to see: Graphic called Where CCIEs work

It seems unfair because the CCIE exam is harder to pass than the State Bar of California or the Certified Public Accounting exam, both of which garner instant respect from all levels of society in the United States.

Cisco says the average pass rate of the CCIE exam over the life of the program is 26%.

In contrast, the California Bar Exam pass rate was 48.2% in 2004, with a passing rate of 62.8% for first-time applicants. The State Bar of California typically has the lowest pass rates of any state bar exam for law school graduates.

With the CPA exam, 40% of candidates passed nationally in April/May 2004. In Illinois, pass rates for the four parts of the exam ranged from 56% to 63% in the same time frame.

Although the CCIE exam is among the hardest professional exams to pass, the enormity of the feat is not well known.

"The networking world is smaller than the accounting or legal fields. There are really a minuscule amount of people who have attained this certification when compared to the number of lawyers or accountants," says Brett Bartow, executive editor for certification self-study books at Cisco Press.