My CCNA books arrived from Amazon today, and I'm pretty excited.

I actually got my CCNA in 2003 towards the end of my junior year of high school but it expired in 2006. The curriculum was offered at my high school, and I really enjoyed the class. We had access to lots of routers and switches to use for practical labs, our teacher was quite knowledgeable, and we occasionally worked on various network projects around the school.

Under the assumption that the exam and curriculum (and material) have changed and advanced in the past 7 years I decided that getting the latest info was a good idea even though I still have an electronic copy of the original material ("Cisco Networking Academy" or something like that).


I'm looking at grabbing a few Cisco 800-series routers and some switches from Ebay (cheaper is always better) to set up a small lab.


Any recommendations/suggestions for someone starting out again? I would like to get into this as a career, if possible. Right now my plans involve getting my CCNA and CCNP, but I'm not sure where I'd like to go after that. I'm always open to ideas from those with more experience.

10/4/2010 10:14:08 PM

Dont bother with buying a lab, just use http://www.gns3.net/ for what little router simulating you need with a CCNA

10/4/2010 10:15:59 PM

I may be behind the curve, but last time I heard this field was saturated. Please correct me if I am wrong.

10/4/2010 10:45:10 PM

is it really? i don't keep up with the networking side of IT, but ^ surprises me

10/4/2010 10:46:20 PM

it's saturated at the entry level.

People with actual skill, experience, and knowledge are impossible to find.

I'm going on three months trying to fill a req, and have turned down about 30 candidates and tossed over a hundred resumes.

The certs are good to have, but secondary to actually knowing the material. Unfortunately, most certified folks don't know shit about shit. They just used exam cram type books to memorize just enough to pass the exams.

10/4/2010 11:13:01 PM

Quote :

"it's saturated at the entry level."

I'm not surprised. There was a constant line (amazing, really) of over 50 people waiting to talk to someone at the Cisco table/booth today at the CSC ePartners Career Connection event in EBII on Centennial. So many hopeful people, so few jobs.

10/4/2010 11:31:21 PM

You can always go with wireless certs. I'll be working on CWNA soon enough.

10/5/2010 12:44:16 AM

Quote :

"You can always go with wireless certs. I'll be working on CWNA soon enough."

Glancing over the topics in the book I noticed that they touch on wireless now. I don't believe it was included in the original course I took. Glad I got the updated books!


Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

10/5/2010 9:37:50 AM

Off topic:

what is the best cert to get now? are almost all them over saturated now?

10/5/2010 12:15:18 PM

CCIE

10/5/2010 12:26:37 PM

^
and more specifically, the CCIE Voice or CCIE Security are the almost guaranteed path to a $150k+/year job.

But, I'll say this-- I have met a few "paper" CCIEs, and like anything else, the cert will get you an interview, but if you still can't hold your own technically, it won't do you any good.

[Edited on October 5, 2010 at 2:14 PM. Reason : .]

10/5/2010 2:13:25 PM

Bobby did you ever get your CCIE? I remember you making a thread awhile back charting your progress but I don't remember the final outcome.

10/5/2010 2:32:05 PM

I never completed it. I took the lab twice and failed, and about two months before what was to be my third attempt my pregnant wife was put on bedrest, and that pretty much ended it for me. The 4-6 hours a day outside of work wasn't going to fly.

Once my kid was born, i made the decision to stop pursuing it-- family was more important.

Moral of the story: I shoulda gotten off my ass and knocked it out either before I got married or before we thought about having kids. I had way more free time then, and didn't take advantage of it.

That said, I opted to switch gears and get on the management track, so ultimately it did not become a career setback for me.

[Edited on October 5, 2010 at 3:10 PM. Reason : PS, i'll respond to your PM soon.]

10/5/2010 3:10:01 PM

Are you a manager?

10/5/2010 6:40:24 PM

yep

10/5/2010 8:50:12 PM

Quote :

"People with actual skill, experience, and knowledge are impossible to find."

We have 4 or 5 reqs to prove it.

10/6/2010 3:38:11 PM

Quote :

"it's saturated at the entry level. People with actual skill, experience, and knowledge are impossible to find. I'm going on three months trying to fill a req, and have turned down about 30 candidates and tossed over a hundred resumes. The certs are good to have, but secondary to actually knowing the material. Unfortunately, most certified folks don't know shit about shit. They just used exam cram type books to memorize just enough to pass the exams."

I think this is largely the result of how hiring policies have changed over the last decade. Companies used to hire entry level people and invest in them. It seems that there is very little of that these days and many of the people who do receive on the job training jump ship as soon as they get a little bit of experience under their belt. Do you agree?

10/7/2010 3:59:17 PM

^You didn't ask for it, but this article does a pretty solid job of extrapolating on my opinion:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx

10/7/2010 10:31:55 PM

^ interesting article

10/7/2010 11:53:28 PM

Quote :

"^ interesting article"

+1
Never thought of it like that.

10/8/2010 9:32:38 AM

cdubya's just posting gibberish that makes his tendency to move from job to job every other year seem like a good idea.


nah, seriously though, I found that to be really intriguing. I I like that it did not ignore this:

Quote :

"At some point in our lives, many of us no longer look towards our career for self actualization. For example, many feel that having a family provides much more self actualization than a career, and choose not to work those sixty hour weeks to meet those tight deadlines. And there’s nothing wrong with that. "

I definitely fall into this bucket.

10/8/2010 11:10:25 AM

Entry level at big companies is now outsourced ... that's really what it comes down to.

Makes alot of business sense, as long as you have a pipeline for acquiring new talent as people leave, or a strong compensation strategy for keeping your experienced talent.

Here where I work , its a shift thats causing lots of pain, as the execution on that strategy has been poor at best... reducing total headcount, ending new hire/college hire programs/increasing the difficulty of the work/failing to compensate and catch up "across the board" along the way.

Our team of 15, which was a strong and balanced team, has been reduced to me (the lone experienced one with a CCIE) and 10 others who have been with the company 2 years or less. 6 months ago, I was about halfway up the pole in experience, and in the top 20% capability wise. Now, I am the only team lead left (and possibly on my way out), and the next most competent person has been on the team for 4 months.


With that said, and more relevant to the actual thread, as I have interviewed over 20 people (who made it through an initial phone screen with someone else), we have been able to hire the only 4 that were actually someone qualified in their abilities to think through problems quickly and apply whatever knowledge they had properly to solve the given problem.

I mean, once they made it through the qualification level (background/certs/experience), only 4 of the remaining 20 could actually walk me through a PC---l2Switch---router on a stick---l2switch---PC scenario, and actually explain what happens when PCa needs to ping PCb ... life of a packet/arp/default gateway/trunking.

The number of people who are actually competent in being able to apply their learned knowledge and experience are few and far between, and so if you are someone who does have those skillz, its all about getting the interview, because for the hiring manager, you become a no-brainer.

So, at the end of this rant and rumbling, if you want a good job in networking, then you need to UNDERSTAND how it all works and why ... not just the timing interval for RIP updates and OSPF hellos. You need to understand why problems occur in real life scenarios, and how to avoid/troubleshoot/workaround/fix them.


[Edited on October 9, 2010 at 8:45 AM. Reason : .]

10/9/2010 8:41:43 AM

robster, thank you for that very informative post!

10/11/2010 8:55:16 AM