As a CCIE myself and working for a leading Vendor in the IT Industry, I have been into situations where the value of a CCIE has been questioned by various reasons, personal or non-personal. And that is quiet obvious considering the latest innovations in the Industry, the so called ‘SDN era’.
There are many reasons why a CCIE is, and still will be valuable in the future, but personally I think and truly believe that you simply CANNOT become a SDN expert without knowing the INs and OUTs of your network infrastructure first. Be it OSPF, BGP, LDP or Segment Routing, a future SDN engineer has to know at the level of an expert most of the protocols that run our networks today. It’s not only Provisioning, the most time consuming is the troubleshooting and that is when you can differentiate between a real Expert that knows the THINGS and another one claiming to be an SDN Expert.
Conclusion, CCIE teaches you all the things in details that runs your complex network infrastructure, and is a very well recognised Expert Level Certification worldwide. And that is not the point where you should stop, still as the market is growing and innovation is happening at a fast and unbelievable pace, the future Network Engineer should fortify his skill set with additional topics ranging from scripting, programming, cloud and NFV as well as soft skills which is a very important and critical part for most of the Network Consultants.
And last, CCIE is not an easy exam, people that have been through the journey of becoming a CCIE know exactly what I’m talking about. It takes time (probably years), energy and determination in order to succeed, eventually pass the LAB exam. I failed many times the LAB exam, but didn’t gave up, and eventually passed and got the so called ‘Magic Number’.
Categories: General Networking
CCIE #49534 
Leave a Reply