CCIE Written Exam Passed

I FINALLY took my CCIE Routing and Switching written exam today.  I had put off taking the exam for so long (I think that my original planned date was in July of last year).  Since I’ve been spending a minimal amount of time on the CLI as I review the IEATC lessons again, I figured that this was a good time to get the written out of the way.  I scheduled the test for noon today and took the day off of work.

I spent about 6 hours last night, and another 3 this morning reviewing my IEATC notes and going over some stuff in the CCIE Routing and Switching Exam Certification Guide (3rd Edition).  This is the least amount of time I’ve ever studied for a certification exam.  Except that it’s not.  I consider the fact that I have been studying for the lab for nearly a year (can it really be that long?) to be studying for the written by proxy.

Since Vue is now the only testing center that Cisco uses and because I now live 30 miles from the nearest testing center; I had to take the test at an unfamiliar test center and I got lost.  I had Googled the location and printed out the map before I left.  I thought it a bit odd that the center was south of where I thought that it should be, but who am I to question Google?  I ended up having to call the center and a very nice young lady played GPS for me.  I was about 10 minutes late and a little flustered by the time I got to the center.  I was silently cursing Google maps.  As it turned out, I had cut and pasted the address into Google maps, but only the last line containing the suburb and the zip code had survived that procedure.  So Google directed me to the middle of Golden Valley as it was instructed.  I was in too much of a hurry to get out the door to notice.  ID10T error. 

The testing center consisted of a single PC on a round table in a small room.  Sweet!  No other candidates to bother me and I had a ton of space.  They also gave me a 2 foot by 2 foot white board and a marker (not dry erase) and eraser.  This was much better than the grease pencil and laminated paper I was used to getting.  Plus if I bombed the test I could still get high off of the marker fumes.

I took a deep breath and started the exam.  And I mean STARTED the exam.  I’m used to answering a long questionnaire before Cisco exams.  This exam asked me if I was 18 or older and then presented the EULA/NDA.  That was it.  It took me a second or two to realize that I was looking at the first question and that time was ticking away.

The exam consists of 100 questions and you have 2 hours to complete them.  Although this is subject to change, the passing score is 70 points (this was on the screen right before I started the exam).  The biggest difference between the CCIE written exam and other Cisco certification exams is that you can mark questions for review and you can go back to previous questions.  This saved my bacon on a couple of questions as I was able to remember/reverse-engineer information that helped on a previous question.  At the end of the exam you are able to go back to any question and see the ones that you’ve marked for review before submitting the exam for grading.

The test was moderately tough, but ultimately fair.  The one area that I was worried about was MPLS.  I had spent some time studying MPLS a few months ago (before one of my many rescheduled written attempts) but I only retained a little of that knowledge.  The exam tests you on MPLS theory only so I did okay (83%) on that section.  The section that absolutely slayed me was Multicast.  This really is not a surprise as it is by far my weakest section in the lab as well.  It was my worst section at 50%.

Otherwise I feel like any lab candidate should be able to do well on this exam.  The questions were mostly straight-forward with the occasional out-of-left-field question that I have come to expect from Cisco.  There seem to be an equal number of flat-out easy questions to compensate for these oddities though.  I scored an 86 which is halfway between passing and acing the test.  During the test I kept track of the questions that I was not sure about and I came up with 21, so I did about 7 points better than I expected.

One thing that did bother me (and I’ll try to tiptoe around the NDA here) is that there were a number of questions about one technology (and only that one technology) that referred to the different variations of said technology by their IEEE names.  I was pretty pissed off about this as I though that this was a level of obfuscation too far.  The ability to review questions helped with these questions (there were at least five) as a later question served as a Rosetta Stone for one of the technologies and I must have guessed correctly on the others because I did well in the section.

I found myself thinking about one of Kevin Dorrell’s recent posts while encountering some of the questions.  There were a couple of questions that the wrong answers could be stripped away with simple logic.  I had one question that asked you to find the true statement about a technology that I only (barely) knew what its acronym stood for.  Fortunately, “p” and “not p” were both present in the answers so it had to be one of those two.  One of the answers serverly limited the capabilities of a Cisco proprietary feature, so I chose the one that said it could move mountains.  A quick DOCCD search at home verifies that I chose the correct answer.

The written is just a ticket to the big dance that is the CCIE lab.  In the lab I’m not going to be able to use test taking strategies to suss out answers.  Still, it’s nice to have this step out of the way so that I can consider myself a true CCIE candidate at long last.

It’s an amazing March day (for Minnesota at least) today.  It’s 52 degrees (Fahrenheit – about 11 degrees Celsius) and I have the rest of the day off.  One of our cats just brought a giant Garter snake into the house.  It must have dug the snake out of its hibernation hole.  I’d better put it back outside again before it warms up and kicks my cat’s ass.    Then I’m off to enjoy the weather.

CCIE Salaries Falling?

Networkworld has an article that states that the CCIE (Routing and Switching is the only track mentioned in the article) is no longer the certification with the highest paid salary associated with it.  [This article only addresses US salaries, not worldwide.]

In a provocatively headlined blog, TechRepublic Executive Editor Jason Hiner writes that “Cisco’s CCIE is no longer the biggest cash cow of IT certification.” According to the Web site’s 2008 IT Skills and Salary Report conducted in association with training firm Global Knowledge, Cisco’s highest accolade for network engineers is the fifth highest-earning certification for IT professionals, following PMI Project Management Professional (PMP), PMI Certified Associate in Project Management, ITIL v. 2 – Foundation, and (ISC)2’s Certified Information Systems Security Professional.

It’s difficult to say how much of a slip this is for the Cisco Certified Internet Expert certification as the survey, which you can download here (registration required), doesn’t provide comparisons to previous years.But the results appear to gel with what we’ve been reporting in recent pasts – that employers are seeking IT pros with business-oriented certifications in such areas as project management and Six Sigma. According to the survey, PMPs command an average salary of $101,695, compared to $93,500 for a CCIE Routing & Switching expert.The Cisco Certified Voice Professional followed in sixth place, with an average salary of $88,600, while the highest paying Microsoft certification is the Microsoft Certified Solution Developer ($84,522), according to the survey.

I am not surprised at the emergence of the Project Management certifications.  The Project Managers (certified or not) at my current and previous job are well compensated (overpaid in a lot of cases, but that’s a rant for another day).  If you read the article carefully you will note that there is no mention of whether the $93,500 is a decrease over previous years.  It could even be an increase.

The NetworkWorld article references this article on TechRepublic.  This article does not mention an increase/decrease in CCIE salary, nor does it show CCIE salaries for past years. 

This might be the reason for the perception of lower value for the CCIE:

The word on the streets at the time was that as soon as you passed your exams you would be bombarded with phone calls from recruiters and Fortune 500 companies tripping over themselves to offer a job with a six-figure salary. That was the perception. The reality was a little more sober, but still very attractive. Many CCIEs were hired directly by Cisco, and others got lucrative gigs as high value consultants.

From what I’ve read, those days are gone – if they ever existed.  BUT the perception that once you get your digits your phone rings off the hook with six-figure job offers still persists in the IT world (at least in my little corner of it).  This has a slightly negative effect as many co-workers and managers assume that anyone actively pursuing the CCIE is only looking to cash in on a position somewhere else.  This means that managers are a little reluctant to fund CCIE training as they might be training an employee for a position in another company or (maybe worse) that this employee will demand a much higher salary immediately after passing.

My quest for the CCIE has never been about money.  I am well paid and I highly doubt that getting my CCIE will amount to much or a pay increase (or any for that matter).  That’s not to say that I wouldn’t leave if I was offered obnoxious money, but I really don’t see that happening.  If I was doing this just for the pay increase, then I would be better served getting into management than trying to get my CCIE.

Anyhoo…the sky is most likely not falling on CCIE salaries.  $93,500 is not a bad average salary and I’m sure that the current Project Manager fad will fade long before the demand for CCIEs does.