CHAPTER

1

What Is CCNA?
The growth of Cisco Systems since its inception has been phenomenal and consistent. This growth has occurred in part due to market dominance in their core product lines, as well as through adding breadth of products through acquisition of other companies. The stock price has grown to the point that many Cisco employees who get stock options as part of their compensation packages cannot afford to leave Cisco and leave such a large sum of money behind! The Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification program was introduced in 1994 as the only Cisco certification. The entire breadth of the then-current product line was allowed to be covered on the exam, and it was intended to be a truly difficult certification to obtain. Certification required an exam (computer-based) and then a hands-on, two-day lab. The failure rate on each portion was high.

NOTE

Cisco does not publish the success rate for passing the CCIE exam or lab. I did some informal surveys, none of which I am allowed to quote. Consistently, the feedback was more than a 50 percent failure rate on CCIE lab candidates, with about an 80 percent failure rate for first-time candidates!

The breadth of Cisco’s product line has been growing and will continue to grow. Inside the Cisco sales arena, Systems Engineers and Account Managers sometimes long for the days of a one-volume, thin product manual. In those days, the entire product line could be memorized. Today, the product line is too broad for any one person to remember and to understand how all the products work. So two problems evolved for Cisco relating to certification: one relating to the breadth of topics, the other to the depth of knowledge required. The CCIE exam could no longer cover the breadth of products. One solution was to create types of CCIE certifications, of which there are now three:

• • •

CCIE—Routing/Switching CCIE—ISP CCIE—WAN

This helped address the problems that the breadth of product