CCIE's with less than a year of experience

I'm no network guru at all. I was wondering if you could explain something to me. How are people getting the CCIE with less than a year of experience or just right at a year? I was doing some LinkedIn reviewing and I noticed a several CCIE with very few years of networking, in fact one person had less than a year documented, their last job was medical related, nothing to do with IT or networking.

Is it something you can power through if you are dedicated or have the resources ($) to pay for a course?

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ccie14023

dmarcisco wrote: »

True but whats the fun in having the labs? I know some people look at the CCIE as a way to get big $$$ from employers but idk I see it as a pride and self satisfaction thing. I see it as a stamp that you know your stuff. I know I'd feel like the man if I go in the CCIE Lab and crush it. After I see that pass email I'd yell "yea i"m the f*n man!" coupled with a few fist pumps and self applause's.

I would describe the feeling of passing not so much as self-adulation but as relief. Not so much "I'm the man" but "Thank God it's over."

xnx

kurosaki00 wrote: »

I still think it's more than doable the legit way.
What exactly in the exam objectives will you not be able to pass without real life experience?
Can someone answer in specifics?
Something you cant achieve with real equipment lab, books, videos, internet?
Again, I'm not talking about difficulty. There are people who complete a BSE in one year for gosh sake. Some people just find the way.

And I'm not even gonna start on what a human brain can **** in it's brain in one year. Specially people who have a lot of downtime/free time every day.

Sorry but I don't think anyone hasn't sat a CCNP exam or has a CCNP should judge whether the CCIE is easy or not.

I've studied some topics using CCIE material and yes I could easily learn the concepts and implement them by following documentation. However there's no way I could troubleshoot any of it effectively.

xnx

ccie14023 wrote: »

I would describe the feeling of passing not so much as self-adulation but as relief. Not so much "I'm the man" but "Thank God it's over."

The same way I felt after I'd handed my dissertation in haha

renacido

I have no Cisco certs but I have interviewed and hired network engineers. And I would rather hire someone with no certs but 5+ years of verified experience than a CCIE with just 1 year of experience for a senior network engineer job.

Legacy User

ccie14023 wrote: »

I would describe the feeling of passing not so much as self-adulation but as relief. Not so much "I'm the man" but "Thank God it's over."

I haven't taken that venture quite yet so its very possible I may share that same sentiment when I reach that point but I'm sure you were still extremely proud of yourself for making that achievement.

kurosaki00

xnx wrote: »

Sorry but I don't think anyone hasn't sat a CCNP exam or has a CCNP should judge whether the CCIE is easy or not.

You people keep missing the point. The point is that we're not talking about cheating death or being 2'6" and want to win a championship in the NBA.
This is a test and IT IS possible to pass in one year with zero experience.
You cant disappear right now and appear in mars. But you can calculate the probabilities of that happening and believe me, is not zero.
I'm not talking about difficulty, I'm talking of whether can be done or not and the answer is YES, it can be done.
Odds of winning the lottery are one in 175 million, people have won the lottery anyways.

The initial question was "Is it something you can power through if you are dedicated or have the resources ($) to pay for a course? "
The answer is Yes, it can be done. Is it likely? Nope. Is it hard? Very. Odds of someone normal able to do it? Unlikely. But It can be done.

networker050184

It certainly can be done. I work with a few of them that have passed with little to no practical experience. These are fairly average people I wouldn't consider geniuses or anything. I applaud their effort and dedication. I have yet to put that kind of dedication into any certification personally.

Debug all

philz1982 wrote: »

Anything can be studied for if you have a full year to focus on it. CCIE with a full year of focused study would be easy, especially with how many resources exist.

Some people say that it is possible in 3 or even in 2 months.

kurosaki00

Debug all wrote: »

Some people say that it is possible in 3 or even in 2 months.

lol I dont know if I would be able to do that in 3 months even with having the answers to it.
That's a lot of information to bottle up.

jamthat

kurosaki00 wrote: »

You people keep missing the point. The point is that we're not talking about cheating death or being 2'6" and want to win a championship in the NBA.
This is a test and IT IS possible to pass in one year with zero experience.
You cant disappear right now and appear in mars. But you can calculate the probabilities of that happening and believe me, is not zero.
I'm not talking about difficulty, I'm talking of whether can be done or not and the answer is YES, it can be done.
Odds of winning the lottery are one in 175 million, people have won the lottery anyways.

The initial question was "Is it something you can power through if you are dedicated or have the resources ($) to pay for a course? "
The answer is Yes, it can be done. Is it likely? Nope. Is it hard? Very. Odds of someone normal able to do it? Unlikely. But It can be done.

So you're saying there's a chance!

kohr-ah

renacido wrote: »

I have no Cisco certs but I have interviewed and hired network engineers. And I would rather hire someone with no certs but 5+ years of verified experience than a CCIE with just 1 year of experience for a senior network engineer job.

Dear Cisco - Dont send the 19 year old IE this direction. (Also I agree)

echo_time_cat

I apologize for giving this old thread a bump, but I saw this in my linkedin news feed today and cried a little on the inside.

When I went to veiw the thread though, it had been removed. Darn, I had some choice words ready to go!

CCIE_dumps.PNG

CCIE_dumps.jpg

Shoe Box

I’ve read a lot of posts here and on other forums about the amount of studying and work it takes to pass the CCIE Lab, and based on that, I don’t think I’d ever take it. I would top out at CCNP.
Aside from that, I would much rather be a CCNP or even a CCNA with a lot of real world experience, rather than be a new CCIE with not a lot of time and work experience trying to get a CCIE level job, and then maybe not be able to do it as well as an experienced CCIE should be able to.

spiderjericho

dmarcisco wrote: »

From what I gather people from those 3 month CCIE boot camps you see overseas would send people to take and purposely fail the lab exam just to see the questions. I'm sure it was done countless times. Thats why if you really look they guarantee if you do there bootcamps you will pass on the first attempt.

I see the Thailand CCIE boot camps pop up on my Facebook. I was actually interested in attending one after I saw a Cisco Networking Academy success story of a teen that passed the CCNA and CCNP course than attended the Thailand course. I'd love to visit Thailand too.

But not crazy of setting foot in a dumping ground. Lol.

rjon17469

I don't mean to fan the flames, but I'll post my experience.

I got my CCIE when I was 27, about 9 months after getting my CCNP. Obviously, I didn't have 20+ years of experience when I passed it. Even before finishing the CCIE though, I was the top engineer for my global Fortune 500 company. I'm now 28 and am the lead network architect for an even larger company. Do I have as much knowledge as someone who has done this for 20 years? Probably not. But regardless, I had to work my butt off to get my digits, experience or not, to the tune of about 1500 hours study time just for the lab. Also note that at my previous company, there was a guy who had attempted the CCIE lab before I even had my CCNP, along with a couple decades of experience. I still got my digits before him.

And that's because it all depends on the person. I'm a single guy who spent a couple years researching and leading workshops on SDN during my M.S. before even thinking of the CCIE, and then spent most of my free time studying for the exams. He was a father/grandfather with 8 kids at home. If I were in his situation, I wouldn't have pulled it off either.

hurricane1091

I don't see how getting the CCIE with zero (key word is zero) experience is worth anything. Being in the real game for 4 months I've already seen and learned so much that you don't get out of a CCNA book. I'll get the CCNP for sure once I finish up WGU, and I think if I stayed here I could get the CCIE - I just don't know that I can put in 1500 hours of work to get it. That's like 5 hours a day for a year!

spiderjericho

I know a guy who got out of the military as a COMM officer (meaning he didn't touch gear) and managed to power through to the CCIE R&S. I met him at an INE boot camp. He was having public discussions with the instructor while the class just sat there lol trying to keep up.

He didn't have any networking experience but I'm sure he's doing good for himself right now.

As someone mentioned, in some cases head hunters want you in order to get that Gold status.

i don't see how it's different than someone who went to school for 8-10 years and got their PHd but had no real-world experience.

adam220891

No experience CCIEs are likely worth very little. You earn your stripes when **** hits the fan. Additionally, there are nearly an infinite amount of ways to do the same thing, and it takes experience to see/touch/experience different environments, which can't be replicated with a home lab.

Now, some are just really smart (I am not) and can grasp things much faster than others, so less experience may be OK, but generally some is surely needed to have an impact at the workplace.

ImThe0ne

hurricane1091 wrote: »

Being in the real game for 4 months I've already seen and learned so much that you don't get out of a CCNA book.

Yes, but we do all know that Cisco tries to keep you in the mindset of their cert level. You're not going to see very much "real world" in a CCNA exam. Exactly the reason I know plenty of very experienced, very skilled Cisco Engineers that couldn't pass today's CCNA if they tried. They couldn't dumb themselves down enough to get on an "Associate Level" to pass the thing. Cisco, among other vendors, loves to throw in 1 or 2 potentially correct answers + the "Cisco answer, specific cert level answer".

The more real world answers come in CCNP, when all the things CCNA "left out" come to light. IE, when they start admitting that hardly anyone uses Rip, Rip v2, or frame relay for that matter. They expand into subnetting to where it actually makes sense in a business environment and not the "CCNA level lab environment".

At least that was the take I got on it...

fredrikjj

I think that if you're "very experienced, very skilled", you'll have no trouble with a CCNA exam. How do I know this? I recently took a bunch of Cisco Netacademy practice test for CCNA because I had free access to the course, and while some questions are "dumb", the majority are not, and they were not hard despite not looking at CCNA specific material in like two and a half years. It's hard to get 100% because there are some obscure questions, but it's not hard to get a respectable score. I don't consider myself very experienced or very skilled so if you are, it should be even easier than it was for me. Unless of course one argues that knowing networking theory isn't an aspect of being very skilled.

apr911

If you have the time and the equipment to lab it all out, then it is certainly doable. In some ways, I think it may actually be easier for someone with limited experience to obtain their CCIE than someone with years of experience.

A person with limited real world experience can be indoctrinated from start to finish on Cisco gear, Cisco technologies, Cisco practices and what I like to call the "Vendor Optimism Bubble" (aka that happy place that vendors like to believe actually exists where their devices never come into contact with a non-vendor device, their technologies work as advertised in all scenarios right out of the box and a customer wouldn't dare do anything different from their documentation/best-practice recommendations) and they are not encumbered by their experience.

A person going out into the real world will quickly have the "Vendor Optimism Bubble" burst as they are placed into a mixed-vendor environment where "open" technologies that "should" function between vendors dont function or require significant one-off configurations to force compatibility or even the occasional one-off config required to get the technology to work between the different product lines or software versions using same vendor.

Though you'd likely be an excellent job candidate for just about anyone, you're experience in the type of environment where the firewall is a juniper, the waf/ids is an impereva, the loadbalancer a F5, the routers are cisco IOS, the aggrs/distro are nexus and the access switches are a cisco catalyst switches or aristas will not amount to much in a CCIE exam.

Finally, you have to consider the fact that as with all vendor exams, there is the "Cisco" way and the "right" way to do things.

These are the reasons I've yet to take the CCIE myself. Though I likely have the knowledge and skill to back most (if not all) of it up, my eyes glaze over and my brain wanders everytime I read a Cisco-recommended process that has serious design flaws in the real world but to pass the CCIE, I will need to know this. (EIGRP vs OSPF in mixed-vendor environments, LACP vs ECMP on Cisco ASA Clustering,

Then on top of that, my preferred track would be for CCIE Security but while I have experience with several IDS/WAF devices, I have limited experience with Cisco WAF. Similarly, because most of the environments I've worked in have required mixed vendor support, Im at a disadvantage for CCIE R&S because of my limited experience with EIGRP and preference for OSPF due to interoperability***.

On a final note, there has been a lot of comments about the hireability of a candidate with a CCIE and no experience and many people have said they wouldnt hire the person. I think we're being a little naive or at minimum not considering the business case for bringing that person on board. Yes, I am hiring people for their ability to support the business but even a CCIE with no experience who I would not let anywhere near my production network has a value to the business. It is probably cheaper to bring the CCIE onboard as a junior admin and hire a second senior admin with experience and no CCIE than it would be to hire just the second senior admin with experience but no CCIE... How is that you ask? Amongst other things, a CCIE certificate holder receives access to smartNet, a CCIE may qualify you for partner discounts with Cisco and employing a CCIE, even if they know F-all about networking, allows you to sell potential clients with the fact you have a CCIE on payroll (which may or may not matter depending on the business) even if most of the heavy lifting is handled by someone else.

*** In recent years, Cisco has made great strides in increasing the interoperability of EIGRP with non-Cisco devices and have been increasingly open about the technology but I have not worked with it enough to comment for certain on the use of EIGRP in mixed-vendor environments.

kohr-ah

People just need to realize a few things.
1 - It is an exam. Learn the way Cisco wants you to answer and it can be done. Doesn't equalize to real work experience but still show you can do what they ask.

2 - There are **** to an extent. Cant **** the exam but you can pretty sure damn close find the answers of what you may see.

3 - CCIE at this point to me is like a bachelors. You are dedicated to learning to something to the point of accomplishment. Doesnt mean you are great at something.

4 - Besides what I said about the previous 3 I do have a respect for MOST people who have done the exam. It is a lot to do and takes a lot out of life and personal time. Those who earn it deserve the numbers and what comes with it. As I have stated in other posts I have met a LOT who couldn't route their way out of a box.. To those.. I hope Karma comes forth.