[From Wendell] I’m out this week, so I’ve asked good friend and co-author Rus Healy to sub for me this week. A quick bio for Rus:
Rus Healy (CCIE 15025) works for Annese & Associates, Cisco’s largest Upstate New York Silver partner. He has experience in technical training and certification, routing and switching, and Cisco unified communications. He worked with Wendell to revise the Cisco Press CCIE R/S Written Exam Certification Guide, which published a few weeks ago.
[From Rus]
Greetings to all. Before I get started, let me take a minute to thank Wendell Odom for asking me to write this week’s posts. Wendell and I have worked together on a couple of Cisco Press projects, the most recent of which was a comprehensive update to the CCIE Routing and Switching Exam Certification Guide. Wendell is a great guy and I appreciate the opportunity to work with him in any venue, so when he asked me about blogging for him this week I accepted his offer enthusiastically.
The focus of my posts this week will be pursuing the CCIE certification. But before I get into that specifically, I’d like to address a broader topic and invite your thoughts on it. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the value of Cisco certifications, and other technical certifications as well. However, most of the discussion I’ve seen has been focused on “value” in terms of the salaries certified people earn–averaged across some unknown number of people, roles, backgrounds, and geographies. Broad trends are useful, but certification is an inherently personal pursuit that requires a great deal of commitment and personal sacrifice. That’s the angle I’m going to address today–namely, why would you, or anyone, individually decide to chase a technical certification or a track of them?
The answer, although it may be slightly different for everyone reading this post, comes down to a key concept: Certification is a way for you to demonstrate to yourself, and secondarily to others, that you can take on a difficult goal and achieve it. This in itself is worthy–and importantly, it shows an employer that you have several key values: initiative, desire to improve your capabilities, hunger for knowledge, and even leadership. When people within an organization begin to earn certifications, it often starts a healthy competition among coworkers that raises the bar for everyone. I’ve seen this work in its most positive form–and over the course of a couple of years, the entire organization benefits from it in many tangible ways.
What motivates people to get certified, specifically in Cisco technologies? Here are some of the reasons I’ve seen:
1) Cisco has laid a road map for you, toward a number of valuable destinations. For example, the CCNA provides a path to core routing and switching knowledge and how to implement these features in Cisco gear. Other certs including the CCNP take that knowledge to another level, and if you really want to learn and put in the work it takes to get a CCNP, you’ll be much stronger technically than you were when you started. Another example is the CCVP certification, a five-exam track to solid competency in Cisco voice technologies. Unified Communications knowledge and skill is very valuable in today’s market, speaking from my viewpoint as a principal engineer in a large Cisco UC-focused partner. Since you now have the roadmaps, why not follow them? They’re all available at www.cisco.com/go/certification.
2) Cisco and Cisco’s partners need you. If you aspire to work for a Cisco partner, Cisco certification will put you on the short list for interviews. It’s almost as good as “knowing somebody.” Note that certification is a ticket to the dance–you still have to be able to dance when you get out on the floor, so to speak, so make sure that you don’t oversell your capabilities.
Certifications are especially valuable to partners to help them meet requirements for specializations, so take advantage of that by knowing what skills partners need in each role. You can find this by checking out www.cisco.com/go/specialization and researching the role requirements for the various technical roles in the Advanced Unified Communications, Advanced Wireless LAN, Advanced Security, and Advanced Routing and Switching specializations. Partner engineers are allowed to fill roles in more than one specialization; you can build a path to one or more of these roles by checking out the requirements for the SE and FE roles, as well as the CQS specializations required for the Advanced Unified Communications specialization.
Furthermore, I’ve heard recently from Cisco SEs that Cisco itself is showing more interest in its own SEs holding Cisco certifications. If you aspire to a technical career within Cisco, certifications will help.
3) Certification is a way to differentiate yourself from your coworkers. When it comes to performance evaluation time, there’s no question that achieving one or more substantial technical certifications can help a person in a technical role to show that he or she has achieved something truly significant and measurable beyond what’s normally expected of them. I’ve personally seen this lead to raises that are well beyond what’s possible without that achievement–even in a non-Cisco/partner environment.
The bottom line is that, from the perspective of a candidate, certification is empowering. I came to an important realization at one point in my career that remains clear in my mind to this day: Nobody can, or will, look out for your career path except for you. Therefore, you should constantly look for ways to empower yourself to take your career to the next level. The most important value in Cisco certification is empowering you–proving to yourself and those around you that you know your stuff. This alone will give you opportunites you may never have seen otherwise. I’d like to hear what you think about the value of certification in your own career experience so that we can have more than a one-dimensional conversation about the value of certification as it pertains to salary.
Next time, I’ll visit the topic of building a path toward CCIE certification.
