VCP5 or CCNA Voice

mallyg27

I just passed my CCNA today. I don't know what I should do next. I was going to try and knock out the CCNA Voice exam, but I'm hearing how VMware is becoming pretty popular. I currently don't have a job in the networking field, but I do work in the IT field as tech support. What are some of you guys thoughts?

matt333

VMware is pretty cool, I definitely share your interest.. but the classes + test is really expensive. VoIP seems to be in demand.. I'd go for that if you don't want to spend like a grand for a cert

mallyg27

matt333 wrote: »

VMware is pretty cool, I definitely share your interest.. but the classes + test is really expensive. VoIP seems to be in demand.. I'd go for that if you don't want to spend like a grand for a cert

Wow I didn't know it was that expensive. So if money isn't an issue then VCP5 would be the way to go?

matt333

Definitely, VCP is pretty well respected and a very difficult exam.. I google'd around and its around 1500+ for the class alone.. it may be worth it, but I couldnt justify getting it unless my job was paying for it or I needed it to get a higher salary.

shnelson

Do you want to get into virtualization?

VCP510 is not a walk in the park, if you don't have a few years of hands on experience with a clustered vmware environment it's even more difficult.

The required classes (cheapest i've seen them is around $2k) are not enough to get you through the exam. It will take a lot of study & lab time. If you're lucky, you could engage with a local college that offers VMWare Academy classes, which will qualifiy you for the exam. I've heard some as cheap as $300 for the course. The difference is spreading the study out over a few weeks vs the traditional 5 day bootcamp - a great way to ease into the technology and give yourself an opportunity to actually learn it.

jamesp1983

Good luck on whatever you choose. It might make more sense to stay on Cisco material and take the CCNA Voice. Voice is a lucrative field at this time, but so is virtualization. Take the VCP after. That's what I would do.

QHalo

While looking for what's hot in IT is great and all, you should probably determine where you want your career to go first and what interests and keeps that interest before jumping around to different technologies and spending money on certifications. It would suck to spend all that money and then realize you don't enjoy doing it.

ChooseLife

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?""That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
(c) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

You may want to spend some time and decide what you want to do for your career. Learning both virtualization and VoIP is good, but spending money and efforts on both certs is not necessary.

P.S. I considered both certs at the time, but eventually abandoned plans to pursue CCNA Voice - after rolling out a mid-scale Cisco VoIP implementation I realized it wasn't "my thing", so even though it was possible to knock out the exam, I didn't feel like spending money and time on something I would not use. (Disclaimer - I'm generally a "cert non-believer" and try to take the minimal number of them)