Hey, what’s up? Tim Warner here, host of the InformIT Certification Reference Guide and the On Certification Screencast Site and InformIT as well. Today screen cast is called a “Fireside Chat” concerning the CCNA Concentrations. Several months ago CISCO announced that they were going to deploy these set of concentrations as they are called to add on to the CCNA credential. Therefore, our agenda today is to understand these concentrations, learn what they are all about and also address what Pearson has on the pan to address these new credentials to help you get up to speed with mastering them should you decide to add one or more of them to your portfolio.
Finally, I will give you my contact information. Frankly, if you have watched many of my screencast you probably memorized my contact information. Anyhow, the CCNA Title, well this is a bit of review potentially if you are new to the CISCO Certified Network Associate title then perhaps this could be of used to you. The two main ways that folks come to this credential which is kind of a golden introductions/associate level certification for those who want to prove their competency as CISCO Network Associates are either the Newcomer’s path being defined as the CISCO Certified Entry Networking Technician or CCENT where you take the 640-822 interconnecting network device as one certification exam.
This is kind of the easier softer ways so to speak. If you do take that ICND1 then when you are ready once you have your CLEG so to speak with configuring CISCO router and switch gear and you understand the basics of the OSI Networking model and so on, then what you do is take the 640-816 ICND2 exam and then you have your CCNA. If you are an IT veteran you can just go ahead and take the 640-802 CCNA exam and be done with it. It is up to you. Those are the two ways to earn your CCNA title.
We have talked quite a bit in other screen casts and over at the certification reference guide about this trend towards specialization. Examples of other titles or other vendors who are using specialization would be CompTIA with their A+ and Microsoft with their MCTS and ITP and MCPD quite an alphabet soup of acronyms, right?
What are benefits to you in this specialization regime? For one is that you are more granularly defining your skills set to whom you might ask. Well, to your current employer if you are a contract individual, you are granularly defining your skill set to potential customers and clients, you are therefore worth more dough to those prospective clients or future employers. Possibly you have got greater opportunity for advancement within your current position. The three CCNA specializations are CCNA Security, CCNA Voice and CCNA wireless.
Now, if you got to CISCO website and read all of their marketing literature they say they have done tons of research and believe me they have, to figure out where networking professionals with, say a few years experience, fine to that they have most need in the market place. Where is their most growth potential, where is their most need and so forth and these are the three areas and I think if anybody is working in the industry now in the IT anyway you can see the immediate benefit IT security, Voice over IP, tell IP, telephony in other words and wireless technology are a hot stuff.
Let us go on the web and check out the CISCO.com stuff. In my opinion, the easiest way to find the CISCO CCNA site is to run a Google search as you see I have done here. Let us click the top link, takes a scene to the CISCO CCNA site, scroll down you can see those exams that I told you about, that is all well and good. But what we are interested in most is over here on the NAV bar. I want you to see these three specialization links. First thing you need to understand and this is one of those “gotchas”. This is not either or a friend, these specializations come after you have earned the CCNA. It is not like you just dive in, let me click CCNA Security. It is not like you just go in there and pickup your CCNA Security in place of the CCNA.
Note, that it says here CCNA Secu
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