Un-qualified Network Academy Instructor?

I'm posting this up to get your guys take on this. About 4 years ago I graduated from a Cisco Network Academy that covered both the CCNA and the CCNP. Since then I have started recommending it to people and trying to get involved in helping this Academy along going so far as getting my current employer to start a co-op program with the academy. Now that I have some friends and co-workers that have made it through the CCNA and started the CCNP potion I recently heard some very concerning information about it. Basically the instructor for the class is not a CCNP and has little to no networking related work experience (I know because I interviewed this person to be the co-op at my place of employment about maybe 4 months ago, they weren't selected). Needless to say some of my friends in the class a rather upset they are paying for someone without their cert (they do not know his former place of employment wasn't even network related) to teach them. I personally feel this is a dis-service to the students as well and plan on asking why my former instructor hired this person to teach.

What is your guy's opinion of this? What are the requirements to be a Cisco Networking Academy instructor at the CCNP level?

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Comments

spiderjericho

I wish I saw this thread earlier. I could've given an answer.

I was (and still can be) a Network Academy Instructor. There is no requirement for the instructor to be certified. The only real requirement is for them to complete the course and the Academy fundamentals course.

It is the local school's policies that will dictate if the instructor has the certification. I've met some Academy instructors who don't really have a networking background, know subnetting, etc.

And with the pass rate... It all depends. You also have to take into account two things 1) Cisco's questions, which are the same lead you down the wrong path as the official certification exams and 2) if the student simply Googled the academy materials.

It really does all come down to the local policies of the school. But the Network Academy Program is great, imo. If you're interested in becoming CCNP, CCNA Security or CCNA, it's definitely a better road than attending a boot camp.

Turgon

RobertKaucher wrote: »

I completely agree. There is a similar issue among foreign language instructors. Some students demand native speakers; others do not. But I think it would be foolish to pay for classes from a foreign language instructor who had never actually carried on a conversation with a native speaker at all, regardless of how well he or she had actually learned the material in the books.

And in the instance in question this was the instructor's first class. All he had ever done was complete the academy, pass his CCNA, and finish the 2 week (or whatever the length is) instructor's course. Ethically, I think there really is a concern here about if this person was truely qualified to teach a CCNP level course. If I were paying good money and my future depended on the work I was doing in the class, I would not want to be the academy's test students for this person as an instructor. I'm not there to be someone's 90 day evaluation period.

I know what you mean. You see these posts from instructors going on and on about minutia of mechanisms on the internet. Give me a break. You are teaching what gets folks through a test. Storm control can do things and you can listen to an instructor tell you ad nauseum about how to configure it in **** detail, either in class or on the latest blog on the internet..but should you be using it, and on an aggregation link with 100 customers at stake what will that do to you potentially?

Turgon

spiderjericho wrote: »

I wish I saw this thread earlier. I could've given an answer.

I was (and still can be) a Network Academy Instructor. There is no requirement for the instructor to be certified. The only real requirement is for them to complete the course and the Academy fundamentals course.

It is the local school's policies that will dictate if the instructor has the certification. I've met some Academy instructors who don't really have a networking background, know subnetting, etc.

And with the pass rate... It all depends. You also have to take into account two things 1) Cisco's questions, which are the same lead you down the wrong path as the official certification exams and 2) if the student simply Googled the academy materials.

It really does all come down to the local policies of the school. But the Network Academy Program is great, imo. If you're interested in becoming CCNP, CCNA Security or CCNA, it's definitely a better road than attending a boot camp.

Thanks for the honesty there. Thankfully my cynicism guessed so much 10 years ago so I didn't fess up hard earned dollars on classroom training. I was better served with ebay equipment and some books and honest toil after work. Again, not to bash instructors per-se, there are some great ones out there, but a lot of mediocrity.

sic..no requirement for an instructor to be certified..
sic..local policies will dictate if the instructor has the cerification..
sic..academy instructors who didnt have a networking background..

This is the double edged sword of the IT industry. Anyone can join it, and anyone can teach it. It's funny, back in 1998 when the IT market was careering out of control even my manufacturing company thought it necessary to spend money on instructors brought in to teach the lame PC users about IT. I had to set up the LAN in the room to enable the training. Both instructors talked a good game, plenty of buzzwords to bamboozle the unintiated. I wasn't impressed when one instructor came to see me to say the room 'doesn't work'. She was clueless about how to make Windows 95 PCs use a shared printer. I fixed it. Same girl a year or two later I met on a train when I had switched jobs and she told me that since I had left the company she had done some more training at my old shop and was asked if she could fill my job in parttime but 'declined due to low money'.hehehe..she had no idea what supporting that site involved! I explained I was in networking in my new job, and she retorted 'my boyfriend does that'..She's no doubt out of this industry and boyfriend to boot. Buyer beware.

SephStorm

For me it comes to this, if this instructor goes out and takes the CCNA and CCNP tomorrow, what will you have gained? Nothing. This instructor has given you confidence, which you took and applied to your career, and benefited from it.

however, I do feel that because he is teaching a CNA course, he should have the cert. I actually just realized however that when I went through the CNA, I dont believe the instructors had the CCNA, but they had to go through the curriculum and score a 90 or above?

spiderjericho

There is no requirement for how much the instructor has to score in order to teach. He just has to complete the course in the instructor role.

I know people who are instructors who basically got low scores or failed the module exams/skills, memorized test prep and are teaching today.

As Turgon said, it's the IT industry. I was "taught" CISSP and CEH by a former restaurant owner. He had experience with the bare materials and had the test questions/answers from a test bank site, but you could tell he didn't know everything.

It's just how the story goes. It's an easy industry to get into. It's not like medical, where at least you have to take some kind of schooling.

At the end of the day, you can COMPLAIN about the instructor this and the instructor that. But as a student of the class and of life, it's really how much YOU put into it. Just read the material, do the labs, etc.

Before I was a CCNA/CCNP instructor, I took a Cisco course at a college (name withheld), and I didn't learn. It wasn't until I went through the Network Academy Program when I truly learned.

And even when I went through CCNA, there were lessons that I could see the instructors were having difficult with like Frame Relay, Introduction to WANs, EIGRP, etc.

CodeBlox

I attended the cisco netacad program and am proud to say it was at Thomas Nelson Community College. Instructor really knows the stuff well. I always had questions and he always knew the answers. There were some things he didn't know but he found out and got back with me. Adequate lab equipment for all too ( lots of 2911 routers and 2960 switches )

NetworkingStudent

alan2308 wrote: »

Not having the cert doesn't mean that someone doesn't know the material any more than having the cert means that they do know it all. Someone might also know the stuff but just not interview well. Experience doesn't always translate well to the classroom either.

The question is how effective of an instructor this person is. I'm not sure what the requirements for a CNA partner institution are, or if there even are any, but I'd be more concerned with how well the instructor teaches than what pieces of paper he has. When I took the CCNA Security class, the teacher didn't have a CCNA security, and let all his Cisco certs expire years ago. Did that matter? Absolutely not.

Find an instructor that you like and try to take all their classes that they teach, that's what I did when I was in school.
I graduated from college last year, and here’s what I experienced.:

I had one class were the teacher said he taught programming, but never taught web design. He had an interesting style of teaching and wanted everyone to work on groups and rely on each other before coming to him. It was puzzling why he was teaching the class, when he didn’t know anything about web design. He let us take an individual test, then a group test, and then we also had few group projects. He felt that we learned more when we taught each other something, rather than him teaching us so he tried to reinforce this concept. I definitely learned more from the students, than the professor during this course. However, I did think it was silly that we were his guinea pigs.

I took a majority of my IT classes from another professor, who was and still is the best in my opinion. He has IT experience and you could just see his passion for teaching. He only had his A+, but he really knew how to teach the material. Yes, he taught courses on server 2008, network+, ect,ect ,ect… He didn’t grade the homework or tests as heavy as he graded the labs. He insisted that students try to do all the labs. He was great because he was always trying to get students internships, jobs ect. You could ask him any question regarding the IT program, classes, technology, certs, or jobs prospects, and he would give you a solid answer.

I think one thing everyone forgets, and what I somehow understand is that these tests/certs are expensive, and often the school won’t pay for voucher or training for the said cert. I remember having one conversation with a professor and he told me that one of his students was going around the world for training, but my instructor just got sent to Saint Cloud, MN for training. The only training he got was a one day conference.

Note-I had an instructor that totally sucked!! He worked in IT and he worked at the school part time. I took one of his classes and he kept changing the curriculum during the class. It was quite annoying and I talk to other students and they didn’t like him or approve of his teaching methods. Funny thing was he was some kind of project manager, so you would have thought that he would have been a better teacher.