Back in 1993 the CCIE Cisco Certification, the first Cisco certification, was created and tested. Yes, the CCIE certification came years before the CCNA certification (1998) and thus Cisco needed a way to weed out candidates who were not ready for the CCIE lab exam. What they came up with was a Written pre-qualification exam to show that the candidate was ready to attempt the CCIE Lab exam. The CCIE Written is not a certification in itself, even though many job seekers seem to think that it is, it is just a qualifier to show that the candidate is ready to attempt the CCIE lab exam. To this day the CCIE written is still needed, regardless if the candidate does not have or has other Cisco certifications. Today though, with all the Cisco certifications, training, and the amount of Cisco networking gear in the enterprise, it is quite different and begs the question, “Does the CCIE Written still make sense today?”
Originally the CCIE written exam made sense as there had been no other certifications, no formal training existed at the time, and the people who could be qualified to take this exam all pretty much knew each other on a first-name basis. Today though, things are quite different. There are both Cisco official training (Cisco 360) that prepares the candidate for the CCIE lab exam as well as “alternate” training companies offering to teach candidates the topics on the CCIE lab exam. Today there is training, blogs, workbooks, mentors, etc that a person is able to learn everything they need about the lab before attempting. They do need to be an “expert” when it comes to what is on the Lab, but have they really shown their progression of knowledge by taking that one exam?
Back in the day when Juniper introduced their expert lab (JNCIE) certification they also had a written pre-qualification. This was because, similar to Cisco, the candidate pool was small and very close-knit yet understood that this was a certification open to anyone. They wanted to make sure that a person who wanted to attempt their lab had the necessary knowledge. Yet over time Juniper dropped the written pre-qualification exam in favor of candidates progressing through the Juniper certification path. Today in order to attempt the JNCIE lab exam a candidate must possess a JNCIA, JNCIS-xxx, JNCIP-xxx in the track that they are attempting. So if a candidate wants to take the JNCIE-ENT, they must have a JNCIA, JNCIS-ENT, and JNCIP-ENT certifications prior to booking the JNCIE-ENT lab. This approach actually helps the candidate build the knowledge and experience versus just preparing for a single exam.
The reason that I mention how Juniper has changed their certification program is because I think it is time for Cisco to do the same, Cisco should drop the CCIE written and start to require candidates to have a CCNP in the track. When you look at the unofficial CCIE Hall of Fame you notice that as of July 2015, we are in the 48xxx for CCIE numbers and according to BradReese.com there are over 38,000 active CCIEs in the world. The CCIE exam is a success and is still in demand to this day, yet has not changed since the day it was first started.
When a person looks at the topics covered by the current CCIE written exam, there are topics there that are not part of a CCIE R&S lab exam. There is no OTV on the R&S exam, that is on the Data Center Exam. There is no L2VPN services on the R&S lab exam, those are on the Service Provider exam. Describing WAN based Ethernet circuits does not sound like a CCIE lab exam topic at all. While I personally prefer IS-IS over any other routing protocol, IS-IS is a Service Provider topic. I have heard the CCIE written exam being described as more of a Cisco network trivia test than a CCIE qualification exam.
Today a person can be a CCIE with no real world experience due to all the training that is available, the “bootcamps” that are out there that will teach you to pass the lab, and sadly by looking for “dumps” on the Internet. The people who obtain the CCIE by these means do nothing but hurt themselves as well as potentially devalue the CCIE certification. By requiring a candidate to have the necessary lower level certifications in their perspective track, Cisco would be helping to ensure that the candidates have the necessary experience and knowledge that goes with the CCIE Certification. By progressing through the certification tracks, candidates will learn progressively and demonstrate their knowledge versus being able to just pass a Lab Exam and call themselves Certified.
If you are aware of how the CCIE program works, you know that a CCIE needs to recertify every two years to stay current. To recertify the candidate must pass any CCIE/DE level written exam, in any track, to receritfy. So what happens if there was no CCIE written to recertify against? I can see two options here for Cisco to adopt, the first option is Continuing Professional Education (CPE) and has been covered very well by Tom Holllingsworth over at NetworkingNerd Continuing Professional Education – the second would be to create a comprehensive CCNP certification written exam that can also be used to recertify. A comprehensive CCNP test would include two of the three current CCNP 300-xxx tests as one test, leaving a third test as a requirement to achieve CCNP certification.
Why do I think it is time for this change? I actually think that it has been time for quite a while as this topic has come up at many Cisco Live NetVet receptions in the past.
References:
History of the CCIE Certification
https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/community/certifications/ccie_routing_switching/written_exam_v5/exam-topics
http://www.bradreese.com/worldwide-ccie-count.htm
http://www.cciehof.com/
http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/certifications/expert/program/360.html
http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/certifications/professional/ccnp/index.html#~Recert
http://networkingnerd.net/2013/08/05/cpe-credits-for-ccie-recertification/
It is time to drop the CCIE written
07 Tuesday Jul 2015
Posted in CCIE
“The CCIE exam is a success and is still in demand to this day, yet has not changed since the day it was first started.” — I’m not sure that’s true for either the lab or writen exams. Could you elaborate on that a little?
As to alternatives, If you think back far enough (like, late 1990s into 2000 I think) Cisco did use a form of CPE. To recertify your CCIE you had to attend at least (some number of) “CCIE-Level” sessions at Cisco Networkers (marked clearly on the session catalogue). Anybody who has ever had trouble getting funding for Cisco Live will appreciate the challenge involved there. Similarly anybody who works for a direct competitor and is thus blocked from attending Live would also have a problem. There are other ways of doing CPE, but the past as ever is a teacher.
As for the replacing the CCIE Written with some kind of CCNP Bundle exam, I’m not convinced that is any better; you’re just swapping one exam for another, so what’s the difference? It’s just another exam with the same problems as all the vendor exams. Now, if you’re proposing that Cisco should actually align the written exam with the content of the lab exam, then yes, that’s just common sense since they’re are supposed to be linked topics. Personally, I don’t like the CCIE Written, but that’s mainly because my job function has tended to span multiple certification tracks, which makes selecting any particular CCIE written track for recertification kind of challenging because whichever I choose there will be areas that stop me dead in my tracks (no pun intended). Meh.
Fair question, What I am referring to how they still require a written as a pre-qualification for the lab exam. When the CCIE first started there were no lower level certifications (CCNA/NP) and they had to find a way to qualify candidates. Juniper did the same thing with their JNCIE back in 2001, they had a JNCIE written exam to qualify the candidates. Though with the JNCIE today, that is no longer the case, instead you must have your JNCIS and JNCIP in that track in order to take the JCNIE lab exam. That means that a candidate has progressed through the lower level certifications in order to take the higher level lab exam, and in some ways making sure that they have gained the appropriate knowledge for the exam over time. It is not my intent to make the post a Cisco certification versus Juniper certification post, just chose that as an easily comparable example.
As for the CPE and Networkerss, I recall hearing about the Networkers requirements in the past, but do not have any solid information on that. Yet with all the on-line learning, Cisco Live sessions on-line and the availability of on-line CBTs and tests, CPE should not be a hard item to do for anyone, regardless of partner status. For a fair example of an Expert level certification that uses CPE, one can look at the CWNE – https://www.cwnp.com/uploads/201311-cwne-ce-programme.pdf .
The CCIE exam has changed in several ways. It used to be two days instead of one. It used to test design skills and require hardware familiarity. It used to have lots of Enterprise protocols (IPX/decnet/sna/appletalk/vines/etc). Before there was a CCIE recertification track at Networkers, there was the CCIE recertification conference. I attended the one in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A lot of people whined about the cost and inconvenience of attending, and so it was merged into Networkers, then abandoned as a requirement soon thereafter. We still had to take a written re-certification test – I took two beta versions of them (different tracks) at Halifax.
I don’t feel strongly about requiring the CCNA–>CCNP progression prior to the CCIE lab although that’s long been my advice as the best path to follow for to those seeking CCIE certification, so I wouldn’t really mind seeing it changed that way.
The consensus of many good CCIEs is that the written exams are of low value and emphasize minutia, and that needs to be fixed. That’s a big part of why I started re-certifying with the CCDE written back in 2008 — it was better aligned with the real world skills I think most good, experienced CCIEs need.
I will say that Cisco is genius in allowing one expert level renewal to re-certify almost all of the other Cisco certifications. Working for partners for two decades, I’ve racked up more Cisco certifications than you can shake a stick at, and that increases the value of renewing my CCIE year after year. I think CPE tracking is potentially at least as much as a bother as taking a test every couple of years, so I’m not wild about that.
Very nice article, but WEIRD to read this article just two days before my scheduled routing & switching written exam… lost for any more words….!
I find the R&S recent exam a bit frustrating: badly worded (ambiguous) questions, trivia (I don’t need to mimic WireShark), etc. Having said that, I keep interviewing CCIE holders who cannot answer basic questions. The exam helps force people to re-up their skills. Although brain dumps or something and what I’m seeing in interviews means that some percentage of CCIE holders are taking shortcuts.
I’m going to disagree with my co-worker David, about reverts. Making people recent on each CCIE would be too burdensome. But I’ve interviewed double or triple CCIEs who are solid say on R&S, but very stale on Security or Voice. That’s not so good. Not sure what constructive alternative I’d recommend.
I agree with this. Make the CCNP mandatory and remove the CCIE written. The CCIE written is really just a surface skim of the CCNP anyway.
I totally agree with you guys. It´s time to change this. There is a lot of people loosing his CCIE´s Certification because it doesn´t exist a course for Written Exams.
If Cisco doesn´t want to drop their business (selling written exams), It could change to CPE and anual manteinance fee like ISC2 does.
I honestly believe it’s gotten worse since Emeritus was introduced. The amount of trivia in the R&S written is insane! Since Emeritus was introduced, the pass mark has gone from 70 to 80.4 and they are making it as hard as they can by introducing topics that don’t fit into the job description of the CCIE in question e.g: R&S containing things like IS-IS, Metro Ethernet, OTV etc. It’s like, now that the older generation can opt out of taking the written they are making the written stupidly hard.
your reason given still don’t make sense because even a cheater will still cheat to get a ccnp and then cheat to get ccie