Is CCIE Dead Or Still a Valuable Certification?

One of the hot discussions today in the IT community is whether Cisco’s CCIE Certification is valuable as before or not. With the popularity and common deployment of Cloud Networking, Network Automation, Software Defined Networking type of certifications and knowledge, many people have been questioning the importance of the CCIE certification.

In this post, we will discuss briefly this point and will make couple of points for why CCIE certification is still valuable. Of course, a good CCIE enterprise infrastructure training for real-life knowledge is very important, but also it helps to pass the certification exam as well. 

CCIE vs. Cloud Certifications

These days, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP Cloud certifications are very popular. They are popular because so many companies started to use different types of cloud services, they take sometimes even just for price advantage.

In private, Public, and Hybrid clouds, many people utilize the agility and flexibility of Cloud Services. When a particular technology becomes mainstream and so many companies start using it, many job opportunity arises.

When Engineers see these opportunities, of course, they want to explore the opportunities. But we need to understand that, still all traditional IT services and models still there, but just in someone else’s Datacenter.

Networking, Storage, Database, and many other traditional IT domains still continue, still there, just maybe not on your own premises. Network Engineers get CCIE certificate because, during their study journey, they need to learn so much about networking, that they become an expert in network operation, deployment, and troubleshooting.

They utilize these skills in Cloud as well of course. So, it is not CCIE vs Cloud, it is CCIE and Cloud!.

CCIE Certification Is Still One of the Most Demanded Certifications by the HR Professionals

To understand whether it is valuable or not, we can check the Job posts. As you will realize from the many job advertisements, many CCIE tracks are still so demanded.

CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure, CCIE Security, CCIE Datacenter, and so on. For example, CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure requires a good level of networking, especially switching and routing knowledge, practical, hands-on experience, and it is utilized in Cloud, IoT, SDN, and many other evolving technologies as well.

Same as understanding Datacenter technologies such as VPLS, OTV, EVPN, Fabricpath, and many others during the CCIE Datacenter journey will help a lot in real-life and in many of the job advertisements today, these technologies will be required too.

Thus, we recommend you to get good training for your CCIE certification exams, gain real-life design and operation knowledge from the training vendors and ask them whether they can support you in a mentorship model as well.