Here is just an excerpt of the text from this wonderful blog that I am sorry to see going away. Wendell Odom has been a fixture in the Cisco Blog landscape for years now. A trusted source of valuable information. Please stop by or even leave any insights you may have on the subject in a comment.
Thanks for my readers too. You guys are MY heroes!
Cisco announced their three CCT certs last week, all geared towards technicians. CCT has a clear and obvious good core purpose: to certify techs that Cisco dispatches to customer sites. The question that's not so obvious, and frankly will require some time to pass before any of us can see the real answer, is how useful, appealing, and popular CCT will become as a general Cisco career cert. In particular, CCTRS may be a pretty easy cert to add once you already have your CCENT or CCNA, but the difficult question is whether CCTRS makes sense as an alternative to CCENT. In today's post, I'll start to tackle that very question.
Really Brief CCENT Overview for Those New to Cisco
(Some of you may be reading this because of your interest in CCT, and you don't know much about other established Cisco certs. This first short section is for you; the rest of you can move on to the next heading.)
On paper, CCENT is Cisco's entry-level cert to all Cisco "career" (aka core) certifications. In reality, however, CCENT CCNA is the true entry-level Cisco cert; most people that plan on a career in networking expect to go past CCENT and get CCNA.
CCENT requires that you pass a single exam (640-822) that covers topics included in a 1-week course. To get CCNA, you can pass two exams: that same 640-822, plus the ICND2 exam (640-816), to give you both CCENT and CCNA. So you can think of CCENT as the "first half" of CCNA. (You can also get a CCNA by passing one exam, 640-802, which covers the topics in both the ICND1 and ICND2 exams; ironically, in that case, Cisco awards you only a CCNA cert, but no CCENT.)
CCENT and CCNA both focus on routing and switching, so much so that they might be better named "CCENT Route/Switch" and "CCNA Route/Switch". Over time, Cisco has added other certs with CCNA in the name: CCNA Voice, CCNA Security, and CCNA Wireless so far. For our purposes, when I mention "CCNA", it's the CCNA that focuses on route/switch.
If you really want to know more, well, you can search Network World's site for the name of this blog, plus CCENT and/or CCNA, and learn a lot. Or look at cisco.com/go/ccent, and cisco.com/go/ccna.
Comparison: Prep Time in Class: 27 vs. 5.5 Hours
To study for CCENT, you can take an instructor-led ICND1 authorized course, or the e-learning equivalent, or do self study with books, learn through on-the-job experience, etc. For the newly announced CCTRS, your only options today are Cisco's $299 RSTECH e-learning course, or OJT.
Making a comparison that is fair based on in-class prep time is difficult, but for the sake of argument, let's say that a CCENT e-learning class that includes labs requires basically the same in-class time as an instructor-led version of the same class. That is, the same lecture with a live instructor takes the same time as watching a recording of that same instructor teaching the same content, and doing labs on the same topics live in class takes the same time as doing them at home in the e-learning course.
If you take ICND1 as a live classroom course to itself, not as part of a bootcamp, you'll be in class around 27 hours. That's a full week course, minus getting done before 5PM on Friday, minus lunch and coffee breaks. So you can think of it as a 40-hour workweek, as the 27 or so hours in the classroom with this math, either way.
