Happy 20th Anniversary CCNA!

 In 200-301 V1 CCC No Category on Purpose, News

20 years already? Yep. #CCNA (and #CCNP) have reached their 20th anniversaries this month, with Cisco announcing these certifications around the Philadelphia Cisco Live in 1998. It seems like a good time to take some time to write a few posts about the exam, take a look back, take a look forward, and have a little fun along the way. Today’s post starts that journey with a few polls just to get the conversation started. Enjoy!

I plan to create three, possibly four CCNA anniversary posts. For this first post in the series, to get you involved, let me ask you a few questions, and we can all see something about other peoples’ journeys with Cisco certification.

 

Your Cisco Certification Journey

Can you remember that first CCNA Exam… and what number it was? Or if you’ve not taken it yet, just choose the current CCNA 200-125 exam. Fire Away!

 

The Exam Revs Every 3 Years… Not!

One of the common questions I hear is, “When is the exam going to be revised?” Unsurprisingly, that’s Cisco’s announcement to make, not mine, so I can never answer.

Those question also get more and more frequent once a CCNA exam passes the 2-year mark. People often assume that Cisco revs the CCNA exam every three years – and that hasn’t been true of CCNA Routing and Switching at all. The timing has averaged about every three years but has varied quite a bit. My math shows it revving somewhere close to 3 years only once.  I’ll list the history of exam release timing in the next blog post, but for now: what do you think the longest time between CCNA R&S Exam releases?

 

 

Exam Points by Percentage: Any Clue?

Next comes a poll question more useful for those of you who have not been paying attention to Cisco certifications for the last 20 years!

Sometimes I hear from CCNA candidates, and it is clear that they have not noticed the point weightings that Cisco publishes along with the exam topics. Cisco’s official exam topic documents organize the exam topics into Domains. Cisco assigns each domain a percentage representing the percentage of points on each instance of the exam that comes from that domain. EG, if a domain shows a 40%, then 40% of the points on your CCNA R&S exam will come from that domain.

Without looking, do you know the percentages of points from each exam topic domain for the CCNA 200-125 exam? Can you make a good guess from when you saw the numbers? Don’t look until you answer!

This poll question asks for your opinion by asking for the total percentage of points from the four domains with the least weighting out of the seven CCNA 200-125 exam domains. Those domains:

  • Infrastructure Services
  • Infrastructure Security
  • Infrastructure Management
  • WAN Technologies

 

An Anniversary Wish: Most Liked, Most Wished

To close today, I’ll ask a couple of open-ended questions. First:

What have you liked most so far about CCNA?

Then, the second is like it, but forward thinking. Thinking towards forwards to a presumptive 30th anniversary of CCNA Routing and Switch:

What one thing would you most like to see in future versions of the CCNA Routing and Switching Exam?

 

Up Next: Cisco Live, Cisco Press, Learning@Cisco, Wendell, Wendell’s Wife, and CCNA!

In the next post, I’ll get to my side of the story with the CCNA anniversary – and it’s more than just CCNA!

Subnetting Learning Stage 3: Accelerating
Wendell’s CCNA Timeline with: Learning@Cisco, CLUS, Cisco Press, & Wife
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Aubrey

Hi Wendell, what do i like most about the CCNA? It kept me employed for the last 15 years of my teaching career. And still does as a semi-retired university tutor 🙂 As a Cisco Networking Academy instructor, curriculum and assessment developer, and Cisco Press tech editor I lived and breathed CCNA (and all things networking). Still do I guess!

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