Article - When do CCNP's actually get hands-on on equipment?

Paul Boz

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/26288?ts0hb=&story=ht

Wendell Odom's column at network world is usually pretty interesting. This article is about a recent survey he conducted that said that less than half of CCNP candidates actually use cisco routing/switching in their day to day job. That's pretty interesting. I suppose I fall into that category myself. We use primarily cisco equipment but quite frankly it just requires baby sitting most of the time. There isn't really much change.

I'm curious to know what you guys think about this, and what anecdotal stories you have about the results.

TTA89

I think the majority of answers are about right. If you work for internal IT at a company how much change are you really doing to the network? Once its up and running you shouldn't need to be making many changes. It then comes down to support, monitoring and change control when something needs to be done.

I worked at a company for 5 years and logged into the equipment a handful of times to make real changes. Most of the switches had up times of over 2 years.

This is why I'd like to get a job with a consulting company, I want to work with the equipment on daily basis.

mikearama

Existing network hardware is damn reliable, and doesn't require much babysitting. That's why I'm glad I'm with a company in the middle of some big changes. We're replacing some older (if you can call 3 year old equipment "older") end-lease gear with new stuff.

The pix's are going, to be replaced by asa's.
Our flat lan-extension solution is half-way through a conversion to MPLS.
We're creating a project plan for voip on that mpls network.
Our contivities are being replaced with citrix access gateways.
Just rolled out Top-Layer IPS boxes.

All in all, busy busy. Our team would not fit into the category described in that article.

Mike

Netstudent

we're in the middle of a lot of cahnges ourselves. We are constantly bringing up new sites which requires work on the network. Then I am doing application delivery was F5, WAN acceleration with WAAS, VPN migration from checkpoint to ASA, and adding MPLS sites. I guess I am one of the fortunate few. I have to stay in our gear all the time.

If I am not in the gear, then I am researching something online or in a meeting about it.

empc4000xl

I can agree with a lot of this. At the NOC where i was at(I need to change my location), We only did basic day to day changes. Most of the work was ping this ping that. Open this close that. But real changes that required thinking and a plan to be put in place rarely came up, and when it did it we hit the books and phone support to make sure our idea was sound before we implemented it. I really don't think its much of a difference at this point(NA/NP), its just a matter of being exposed to technologies and knowing whats out there and being tested by cisco to say you have competency in those technologies.

Slowhand

I read that article the other day, and it was interesting to see how many people aren't actively working with Cisco networking equipment as they're doing their CCNP, (or other pro-level cert). The thought that occured to me, though, was that the article didn't really touch on how many people build their own home labs vs. how many use simulators; (and how many don't do any hands-on studying at all). That would have been an interesting poll, as well.