Blog Posts about Cisco Certification

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Every month Pearson imprint brands partner with Network World to offer up expert authors as featured bloggers for their community subnet sites. Focused on Cisco, Microsoft and Open Source, each community offers a variety of hot discussions, exclusive sample chapters and giveaways to their readers.

The CISSP exam is getting better about mapping to the needs of the industry and keeping up with where the changes are taking place in technology, methodologies, and practical security models. The exam has had a reputation of being out of date and covering things that we have not done in our industry since caveman days. I have been a critic about the exam pertaining to this issue, but I must admit that the exam is changing more quickly. This allows people who are studying for the exam to study topics and concepts that they will run into in their careers and are required to be understood.

This is hot off the proverbial presses: in keeping with recent industry trends among IT certification vendors to offer specializations for their mainline credentials, Cisco announced three new concentrations to extend their extremely popular (and respected) CCNA certification.

The bottom line is that in order to succeed on your Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) exam, you need to have some practical experience with Cisco hardware under your belt. However, this truth presents a "chicken and egg" situation for many candidates; that is, you typically need an industry job to gain hands-on experience with Cisco routers and switches, but you need the CCNA to get the job in the first place! Read on, friends...

Well, I suppose that of late I have been predisposed toward discussing IT certification exam security. What inspired this topic, I think, is the staggering number of students who ask me in all innocence, "Should I use braindumps to study for my tests?"

Computer-based testing happens to be the most common delivery mechanism that most IT certification vendors use to deploy their exams. Unfortunately, some test-takers make faulty or incomplete assumptions with regard to how computer-based testing systems work. In this essay I will address three of the most prevalent myths as culled from my professional experience as a technical trainer.

Physicians call 20/20 hindsight as the "retrospectoscope." Likewise, I would bet you 20 dollars to a stale jelly donut you left the testing center after taking your first certification exam with a number of "I wish I knew..." gotchas. Let me share five of my personal favorites with you.

It seems to me that the operating mantra of some of those who steal copyrighted IT certification test-prep materials (CBTs, practice exams, study guides, etc.) is "Knowledge is free! Spread the knowledge!" While I am all for the legal and legitimate spreading of knowledge, I nonetheless want to remind these individuals that there is always a price to be paid for gaining new understanding.