Should I go for the jncia Junks?

I recently got myself a new job which I'm enjoying so far. I had intended to do my ICND 2. Anyway it turns out the company I'm now working for use Juniper. For career progression there I feel having some Juniper certs would be good. Would I be better served getting my CCNA or would I be OK jumping into the Juniper stuff?

My phone autocorrected Junos to junks

could a mod edit the title?

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dsgm

Why not go for both, too much networking is never enough. I myself have both and actually found myself enjoying juniper thinkin about going further into the juniper track after i get some experience

DoubleNNs

I believe you can edit a thread's title w/o a mod's intervention.

I suggest the ICND2, quickly followed by the JNCIA.

Staunchy

I agree with what DoubleNNs said, finish off CCNA 1st while you used to the way Cisco does things than go fo JNCIA.

I am busy with JNCIA and planning on writing this coming Friday and so far I enjoy juniper a lot but the CLI structure is quite a bit different. Junos is a lot more like Cisco IOS-XR

tomtom1

I agree, finish up that Cisco certification. My experience today (been in networking for 3-4 years now) is that the knowledge gained by completing the CCNA is of tremendous help in my daily work. Just like you, our company works with Juniper for most of the netwerking requirements. We've deployed SRX firewalls, EX switches / L3 routers which do some interesting stuff like BGP / OSPF / Routing-Instances (VRF if you will). However, when you have the basics down, and your CCNA can help you there, it's pretty much all the same.

For example:
-> When does a PC, or a router forward a packet to it's default gateway
-> How does a router decide what the best path for a packet (let's say the destination network is 10.10.10.0/24) is? Especially when multiple prefixes exist for the destination network? I.e. one with 10.0.0.0/8 and one with 10.10.10.0/24?

The answer to both questions are fundamentally the same on both Juniper and Cisco.

I'm hoping to complete some Juniper certifications later this year too. So my advice, finish up that CCNA and then start looking at some Juniper certifications. You'll see some overlap in the material and you'll even have an advantage if your CCNA knowledge is still fresh.

DirtyData

Finish your CCNA then aim for JNCIA/JNCIS. Networking fundamentals don't change across vendors so a CCNA would still be beneficial. IMHO the JNCIA is more proving your knowledge of how Junos OS works with very very basic networking added on.

dazl1212

Thanks for the replies, I cant seem to find a way of editing the thread title

Thing is with the CCNA I will basically be starting from scratch as I did the old (easy) CCENT and that was over 6 months ago.
Had some challenging stuff going on plus starting this new job..

I was just thinking the Juniper stuff would be immediately helpful given that's all my current company use.
But maybe the Juniper stuff would be too hard to do without the CCNA behind me?

DoubleNNs

You could always do both simultaneously. It wouldn't be too hard but it'd take you much longer to get the actual certifications completed.

You could focus on the ICND2 material for concepts and set up GNS3 for both Juniper and Cisco. Then when labbing, lab both IOS and Junos.

dazl1212

My attention span isnt amazing.
I doubt I could do two at the same time