From: Jay Hennigan (jay@west.net)
Date: Mon Mar 10 2003 - 05:29:05 GMT-3
On Sat, 8 Mar 2003, Richard Danu wrote:
> Excuse the overhead - Please reply off-line.
Actually, I think much of it is germane, from the Cisco perspective of the
"triangle" pie chart. Experience, training, and self-study are all factors
for success.
> Truth of the matter is, if an individuals can potentially pass and attain
> their CCIE, while continuously practicing on routers as a "hobby", how could
> they ever find themselves in the job market as internetworking professionals
> in a production environment?
One of the things the CCIE measures is performance under stress, which is
absent from most "hobbies" and more along the lines of a desirable trait
for internetworking professionals in a production environment.
Yeah, you do have to get away from the "reload everything and see if that
fixes it" mindset that you tend to pick up in a lab environment. :-)
> In my opinion, passing a CCIE examination hardly measures up to veterans who
> have worked long hours and solved an array of vast, tough, challenging,
> problems on internetworking, for numerous, counting years... I am simply
> looking for feedback what some of you have done to move from the bottom, to
> the prestigious network engineers you are, today!
The veterans who spend long hours for numerous years (raises hand...) find
much of their time spent not solving an array of vast, tough, challenging
problems. We often find ourselves solving similar problems over and over
again. Much of my time as a seasoned internetworking professional is spent
yelling at telephone companies to fix layer 1 and 2 issues. Again.
If you're looking for an array of vast, tough, challenging problems, then
a four hour lab scenario in my opinion is a tougher mental challenge than
a typical forty-hour work week in a production environment. Most production
environments don't have multiple routing protocols redistributing over a
huge array of LAN and WAN technologies, etc.
As you get more into the design side, there is the chance that you'll
have customers with off-the-wall needs or the need to intermix a number
of internetworking technologies. More often than not, however, these
real-world oddball cases are NOT in a pure Cisco environment, so they
don't map one-to-one with CCIE study.
I would say that the discipline, training, and study that I put in to
getting the CCIE has helped me on the job much more than my experience on
the job has helped me get the CCIE. This is a good thing, if employers
"get it", for those with the certification.
For the lower-level certs, the opposite is probably true. Working with
the technology daily is a huge jump over reading books for the CCNA and
the CCNP path, although there are still some things that take study.
-- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Administration - jay@west.net NetLojix Communications, Inc. - http://www.netlojix.com/ WestNet: Connecting you to the planet. 805 884-6323
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