Should you do the CCNA in 2024?

hi guys what's up welcome back to the channel my name is Jared and today we're going to talk about the Cisco certified Network associate the CCNA and whether or not it is a valuable certification to do in 2024 if you're completely new to it and you don't know who Cisco are Cisco are humongous company they sell a range of different network equipment such as switches routers Wireless firewalls telepan collaboration tools they do a lot of stuff and as it stands in 20 24 in the world of routers switches and networking Cisco is the current King of the market according to delorio group they currently hold a sizeable 46% of the market sh the CCNA is one of those certifications that every network engineer should strive to get well at least that's what I thought I started researching this video a couple weeks ago and I found a load of videos online and blog posts and stuff and everybody was saying that the CCNA is dead don't do the CCNA it's a waste of time and honestly I was pretty shocked for me the Cisco CC was the very first certification that I ever did it was literally the first thing that I learned so n for me I was a bit sad to hear that the CCNA was no longer relevant so I decided that I would check a number of different jobs and actually check for myself to see is it something not if you're new to network engineering and you want to get into the network engineering field is it worth doing the exam easiest way to do that is literally just to check LinkedIn jobs and see what [Music] there so I've just opened LinkedIn jobs and I've searched for Network engineer CCNA I'm based in London so I'm going to search the whole of the UK I'm looking for two things ideally the first thing I'm looking for is whether or not the role stipulates that CCNA has required or ccmp or any Cisco certification the next thing is whether or not it mentions Cisco Technologies within the job description if it does mention Cisco Technologies within the job description then it clearly means that a Cisco C would probably help get that role so let's look at the first job this is a network architect Cisco CCNA ccnp go to the next one this one we're actually looking for ccmp or ccie this one industry certification such as CCNA ccmp CCI fig on top your core network devices ccmp we'll take CCNA if you have ccmp booked interesting and next one again CCN ccnp highly desirable next one again Cisco firewalls Cisco networking CCN level so after looking at a number of network engineering rules on LinkedIn I can 100% yes the CCNA is still very much valid certification in 2024 now that is specific to network engineer positions if you are someone that works in cyber security or cloud or infrastructure or one of those different fields then yes understanding the networking content the CCNA content or even the network plus content would be very much beneficial to you but whether or not you should do that certification is is really up to you I don't think you are going to get hard into any of those roles based on having the CCNA certification so I would definitely say learn the content but maybe skip pain for the exam speaking of the exam it's been a while since I've done the CCNA so let's check out the exam outline and see if it's changed much the CCNA exam is a performance-based exam so you don't really know how many questions you're going to get it is 120 Minutes long you get multiple choice questions and you also get a number of simulations that you have to complete that basically means you need to know the theory and you need to get hands on you need to build some Labs the exam is broken up into six different sections which is quite good because you could literally print this off and go down through these and learn each of them and tick them off as you go along that's a good strategy to actually pass an exam one thing I do want to mention here is it used to be whenever you were doing Cisco certifications that you had to do the CCNA then the ccmp and then you could do CCI but Cisco of since of that so you don't necessarily have to do the CCNA before you do the ccmp as youve seen a number of different jobs have asked for you to be CCN or ccmp level getting into a network engineering position as a ccmp is much easier than a CCNA that sort of means should you bother doing the CCNA or should you just continue your study on and then go for the ccmp another good reason to maybe skip the CCNA and just go to ccmp is the ccmp has actually made up of two exams the first exam this 350 41 on core exam that is actually the first exam you need while doing your CCI this certification is actually quite a good one because if you do that first exam and the second one to pass the certification then the next thing you literally have to do is do the the CCI lab and then you've done the whole lot so that's just something to consider if you see your future in the networking field so let's talk about content how would I go about studying for the CCNA in 2024 back when I was doing my CCNA I used CBT Nuggets in fact I use them for my CCNA voice my CCNA Network and switching and also all of my ccmp exams I think their content was really really good it was broken down in the small little chunks it was easy to digest and understand and the good thing is they bring you through lots of labs and tutorials that you can actually do as well the next thing I would do and I would do a lot of this as much as you possibly can and that is build as much things as you can there's so many different ways that you can build networks these days for the CCNA exam you can use use packet tracer Packet Tracer is a Cisco tool that they've created and it's available as part of the network Academy you can actually download for free I put the link in the description below the other thing you can do is use an emulation platform something like evng or another tool you can use called gns3 I used gns3 most of the way through my ccmp uh I've used evng quite a bit as well for building lots of labs they all have free versions of these platforms I think for CCNA packet just fine but if you want to go for the ccmp or even CCI certifications then you definitely need to use something like evng or gns3 so if you've followed down through the video course by CBT Nuggets you've also built a number of different Labs then really the last thing you need is some books and the reason the books are good is because it gives you a lot more information that you're you're never just going to get from those video courses I really wouldn't go past Cisco press books first of all they are the official study guide for the exams and there is two books in general that I think you should get the first book is the official study guide and the second book I would recommend is the portable command guide these are really really helpful because you can use these to build all of the labs that you need and in fact that's exactly what I did I bought each of these books I had for my certifications and I use them to build labs and that's how we really learned a lot of the content so thanks for watching I hope this has been helpful I hope this has answered some questions you have on whether you should do your CCNA or not so if you're excited to get started with your CCNA two things you need to do sign up for CBT Nuggets or another platform CBT n is just the one that I used then number two is build that emulation platform I've already have a video created I link it here and that is how you can build evng on proxmox thank you so much for watching hope this was helpful if you're going for your exam good luck and I'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: Gerard O'Brien

Views: 3,662

Keywords: CISCO, Cisco CCNA, CCNA in 2024, Routers, Switches, Networking, Cisco Certification

Id: g23VP-dw3m8

Length: 7min 33sec (453 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024