CCNA Certified People, I Need Your Help

Can you guys please give me a description of what your typical day at work is like? Also, what is the hardest problem that you've run into at your job?

How long did it take you to get certified?

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CodeBlox

I will be a CCNA very soon. Took about 6 months. A typical day at work thus far has involved the question "Paper or plastic?" many times throughout the day and I'm not kidding either. I'm a newbie so thats why haha. I'm actually just getting into the field at a Help Desk.

Bacsilove

CodeBlox wrote: »

I will be a CCNA very soon. Took about 6 months. A typical day at work thus far has involved the question "Paper or plastic?" many times throughout the day and I'm not kidding either. I'm a newbie so thats why haha. I'm actually just getting into the field at a Help Desk.

That’s good to hear! I'm trying to get a perspective on what a certified CCNA tech does so that I can decide if I’d be interested in getting Cisco or Microsoft certification.

I guess I should have made this thread a little broader and asked for opinion from both side. I’m having quite a tough time right now trying to decide if I should go for MCITP or CCNA. However, that’s a question for another day. All I want to know right now is what CCNA is all about. =D

CodeBlox

I will say this, almost ALL of the jobs around here that require CCNA also want it coupled with 4+ years of experience. I seem to have never found anything with less of a requirement.

gouki2005

CodeBlox wrote: »

I will say this, almost ALL of the jobs around here that require CCNA also want it coupled with 4+ years of experience. I seem to have never found anything with less of a requirement.

and the eternal question? if the ccna is a "basic" cert how the heck you can get that much exp? and with 4 years of exp you easily could be a ccnp

Overdash

I'm a CCNA and I can tell you that does stand for squat. It's less about what cert you have and more about how much you know/what you can do. Experience is key. The best experience is homelab because then you can actually APPLY your knowledge to your work. If you want to be a Systems Administrator but have never used the Active Directory Migration tool then its time to build a server 2003 domain and a 2008 domain and lab up!

Another example is that I have zero use or care for an e-commerce server, but there are companies that NEED Sr.E-Commerce Administrators.

Point being: If you try to do IT for fun chasing this vendor or that technology you will start/end up at the help desk. Every time.

gouki2005

Overdash wrote: »

I'm a CCNA and I can tell you that does stand for squat. It's less about what cert you have and more about how much you know/what you can do. Experience is key. The best experience is homelab because then you can actually APPLY your knowledge to your work. If you want to be a Systems Administrator but have never used the Active Directory Migration tool then its time to build a server 2003 domain and a 2008 domain and lab up!

Another example is that I have zero use or care for an e-commerce server, but there are companies that NEED Sr.E-Commerce Administrators.

Point being: If you try to do IT for fun chasing this vendor or that technology you will start/end up at the help desk. Every time.

yeah home lab rules but if you dont have the money to get another pc the virtual lab rules more lol..
GNS+virtualbox = good and extremly cheap ccna/ccna security lab of course if you can pay the real thing do it its better but if you are like me a student this way is the best and if you get the right lab/guide/book you can learn lot of things for free instead pay LOTS of money for a single course

Overdash

gouki2005 wrote: »

yeah home lab rules but if you dont have the money to get another pc the virtual lab rules more lol..
GNS+virtualbox = good and extremly cheap ccna/ccna security lab of course if you can pay the real thing do it its better but if you are like me a student this way is the best and if you get the right lab/guide/book you can learn lot of things for free instead pay LOTS of money for a single course

I did my CCNA with 4 2610/11's a 2509 terminal server and three 2950 switches. Cheap little home lab that does wonders for your career.

I've used dynamips, packet Tracer, and GNS3 and while I LOVE the concepts I have found simulators to be buggy.

I agree 100% on the "virtual lab rules" I am working on Microsoft Certs and it rocks using Hyper-V on my core i7 with 16GB's of DDR3. (Wasn't cheap but worth it!)

N2IT

Overdash wrote: »

I'm a CCNA and I can tell you that does stand for squat. It's less about what cert you have and more about how much you know/what you can do. Experience is key. The best experience is homelab because then you can actually APPLY your knowledge to your work. If you want to be a Systems Administrator but have never used the Active Directory Migration tool then its time to build a server 2003 domain and a 2008 domain and lab up!

Another example is that I have zero use or care for an e-commerce server, but there are companies that NEED Sr.E-Commerce Administrators.

Point being: If you try to do IT for fun chasing this vendor or that technology you will start/end up at the help desk. Every time.

Great post

It took me a year of cert chasing to finally realize this. For me it's ITIL. I am a service supervisor / manager and use the ITIL framework and processes everyday. The experience is great and hopefully I will have the V3 Expert sooner than later. My career track has a tight scope.

NOC-Ninja

Bacsilove wrote: »

Can you guys please give me a description of what your typical day at work is like? Also, what is the hardest problem that you've run into at your job?

How long did it take you to get certified?

It took me 6 - 7 months.

wait for a fire and then I put off the fire.
theres so much on networking that it depends on what the problem(s).

Bacsilove

I really need to start looking for tutorials on how to build a home lab to practice. =/

ehnde

I'm a brand new CCNA and just recently started my first real job requiring this certification. First let me tell you I use less than 40% of what I learned while studying for the CCNA....but my job is sort of entry level (they wanted 1 year of IT experience and I had about 4 years total in IT).

I work in a NOC - Network Operations Center - for a large ISP. What shocked me was the amount of layer 1 and 2 equipment I wound up dealing with and troubleshooting and how it is done. You see, I don't so much troubleshoot these devices as I do connect vendors for that equipment to the service technicians in different areas. There is alot of conference calls involved. If dealing with business customers I might be doing show commands to find out why their connection is down.

An entry level CCNA does alot of monitoring. You will probably be the first line of troubleshooting dealing with some kind of "ticketing" system. The tickets I see almost always come from SNMP into an NMS.

The type of job I'm describing is not so much customer oriented, but you do wind up talking to ALOT of people via phone and email.

shodown

Depends on the job.

1 job. Answer phone, check T1 circuits, call provider.

2. Answer phone, ping device move up the stack, Check BGP peerings, MPLS LDP, call Tier 2/3

3. This was finally a Network Engineer job. Do basic Design( 1-T1, with OSPF all to Multiple OC3's, with BGP fail-over, Deploy multicast through the WAN, Tier 3 Support for the NOC, exploring new technologies to deploy)

I've had all these jobs with a CCNA. Day to Day for all of those jobs varies but you can see that job 3 was move involved than job 1/2.

phantasm

What a CCNA does with his cert is varied. I know engineers with 15yrs of experience and a CCNA and they design and run everything. I have a CCNA and work in a Tier II capacity doing advanced troubleshooting and implementation for a world wide network. Every day is the same... yet different.

it_consultant

Bacsilove wrote: »

Can you guys please give me a description of what your typical day at work is like? Also, what is the hardest problem that you've run into at your job?

How long did it take you to get certified?

Most of the time I work on Exchange Servers and firewalls.

pham0329

Overdash wrote: »

I'm a CCNA and I can tell you that does stand for squat. It's less about what cert you have and more about how much you know/what you can do. Experience is key. The best experience is homelab because then you can actually APPLY your knowledge to your work. If you want to be a Systems Administrator but have never used the Active Directory Migration tool then its time to build a server 2003 domain and a 2008 domain and lab up!

Another example is that I have zero use or care for an e-commerce server, but there are companies that NEED Sr.E-Commerce Administrators.

Point being: If you try to do IT for fun chasing this vendor or that technology you will start/end up at the help desk. Every time.

While that is true, the cert do help you get in the door. I can say for certain if it wasn't for my MCITP, I would have never landed last job as a System Engineer. If it wasn't for my MCTIP: Enterprise Messaging Admin cert, I wouldn't have landed my current job. Granted my understanding of the technology is what kept me around, if I didn't have the certs, I doubt I would be given the oppurtunity to demonstrate my skills/knowledge.

Although I'm not CCNA certified yet, I'm the network admin for our environment of 50ish switches/routers. I would say that daily duties involve very little networking, and more servers oriented tasks.

To be honest, in a small-medium size business, which is what the CCNA is geared towards, once the network is up and running, you're not going to have to touch it very often.

Overdash

pham0329 wrote: »

While that is true, the cert do help you get in the door. I can say for certain if it wasn't for my MCITP, I would have never landed last job as a System Engineer. If it wasn't for my MCTIP: Enterprise Messaging Admin cert, I wouldn't have landed my current job. Granted my understanding of the technology is what kept me around, if I didn't have the certs, I doubt I would be given the oppurtunity to demonstrate my skills/knowledge.

Although I'm not CCNA certified yet, I'm the network admin for our environment of 50ish switches/routers. I would say that daily duties involve very little networking, and more servers oriented tasks.

To be honest, in a small-medium size business, which is what the CCNA is geared towards, once the network is up and running, you're not going to have to touch it very often.

Your right the certs do get people in the door my CCNA did help me get an entry level job. I've changed from helpdesk to field tech and as soon as a clients hardware order comes in I am going to be working on configuring all sorts of servers and network devices so I am actually trying to bone up on server 2008 R2 and get the MCITP this year.

Lamini

My experience is that IP touches everything in IT. If I were to make an analogy, see it as the trunk and its branches, to all the leaves.

I personally see it as the root. It can very well be your foundation in IT. You cant fully understand an operating system, security, servers, and probably many other topics without understanding IP. You'll see its the one commodity in just about everything. Not understanding it can easily lose your footing, understanding it will give you that edge, and allow you to grasp a variety of topics easier than others (but it wont come overnight). You will most certainly see no damage done to yourself and will be less frustration down the road once its understood. That i guarantee

hexem

CCNA is useful...if the company actually provides and uses cisco 100% if you end up in a help desk role you will not just be working with cisco routers/switches, the knowledge is good but you could pass and not use those skills/command for a while and forget, which would make everything but fundamentals of networking in general obsolete, still worth it if you fun that kinda stuff fun.