Continuing Education as the New Model for IT Certifications
I have been involved in IT certifications since 1998 first with Microsoft and Novell and then with Cisco as they first created the very popular and well known CCIE and CCNA. At that time certifications were a way to cover the gaps between knowledge learned through traditional university education and the rapidly growing vendor skill sets. In short, people were graduating with theoretical knowledge but lacked the real life hands-on skills that were necessary to drive companies forward when using the actual equipment.
Very quickly certifications rose to a level where they were worth more than a degree in many instances. Someone with a CCIE in the late 90s was truly an expert in the configuration of Cisco equipment. Soon after this, other popular certifications began to be susceptible to cheating and soon the term “paper MCSE” for example began to emerge. For the most part, Cisco was protected against this for many years because their exams required a significant portion of fill-in-the-blank questions and they quickly adopted simulators where students had to correctly configure devices on the exam.
Today, it is now possible to cheat much the same way you could on the other exams. Cisco has spent millions in lawsuits and other tactics to defend against this. One of the approaches taken is to constantly refresh the exams. While in concept this works, it also hurts those that are already certified. Today, a CCIE is forced to retake the qualifying exam every three years to re-certify. At this very high level this is an outdated approach. Why should a practicing expert have to go through an exam, that by design was created to fail people so only the best emerge and are allowed to attempt the true exam, which is a hands-on lab exam.
Can This Be Normalized To Match Other Industries?
The question to the market is, if an individual has achieved expert level should they have to constantly go through exams, many which include emerging technologies that many of the experts are not working with. Their jobs and roles simply don’t require it. Or worse those that have been experts for 10-20 years should they really have to re-take the same exam they passed over 20 years ago to prove they are an expert?
If we take a look around at other industries where certification and accreditation are used such as with attorneys, doctors, plumbers and electricians we see a different model used. These fields all require an established expert level to be allowed to operate in the market but attorneys do not have to re-take the BAR exam every few years, nor does an electrician have to go back to an exam to re-certify. Is it now time for IT to follow the same model? The reality is many organizations now require certain certifications for IT positions so why not follow this same accreditation or professional license model and evolve IT certifications to where they should be today?
“Terry, I recently heard that you joined forces with Phil Morgan to create a CCIE Wireless course. I could almost feel the ground shaking! Knowing your unparalleled ability to recruit top talents, knowing Phil’s expertise (not only in the Wireless field, but also in the difficult art of taking the CCIE exam), I have no doubt that you two will build the best possible training! For having known and worked extensively with both of you on numerous projects, I highly trust you both, and am very happy that you decided to help the wireless community. I can’t wait to see the CCIE and CWNE numbers increase thanks to you! I really like how you guys are approaching the training market, I feel you guys are going to change the industry for the better. I wish you both good luck and let me know if I can help in anyway.” –Jerome Henry, CCIE W & CWNE, Cisco Technical Leader and CWNP Board Advisor
NC-Expert is a strategic training partner for several vendors and certifications including Cisco, CWNP and EC Council. I have been meeting with executives within each of these vendors recently and these conversations have sparked my desire to spread the word on something truly revolutionary and innovative I see emerging in the market.
Who is CWNP?
Let’s first talk a little about CWNP since many do not know who they are. They were founded in 1999 and set out to become something unique. They were focused on wireless technologies and their goal was to create a vendor neutral certification. Meaning they were not sponsored by any of the vendors that created the wireless equipment. This was a very different and risky approach since many of the more popular certifications were always created by the vendors. The vendors used certifications for two primary reasons, first to establish skill sets and second to market their products. Since they approached the certifications in this way, the vendors allotted a portion of revenues to build and maintain their programs. For CWNP, they were taking on the challenge to fund all of this on their own.
For the first twelve years the CWNP certifications slowly began to get recognized but in 2012 the company was sold and the original founders handed the program over to a new executive staff. At this point the company had a renewed focus and the changes they made have been critical to growing the company to where it is today. Some of the original founders can still be found in the market free lancing as wireless experts and trainers, doing their part to keep the program growing.
NC-Expert became a Training Partner in 2011 just prior to the change in leadership and we have seen a very positive impact to the program from the new team. Over the past 6 years we have operated as one of the few Premier Partners maintaining CWNP’s highest and most trusted status. We have instructors that teach all aspects of the program from CWTS, the entry level certification, the popular CWNA and all three of the Professional Level certifications (CWSP, CWDP and CWAP). We also have very unique programs that help those that have passed all of the professional certifications to move forward and gain the sought after CWNE level.
“We are proud to be working with NC-Expert as a Premier Learning Center. NC-Expert has been a partner for many years and has helped to grow the CWNP community through their training programs.” –Rameshwar Nigam, General Manager of CWNP
In addition to CWNP, we also teach the Cisco Wireless certifications and are listed as one of the only Cisco Learning partners in the market that have a full CCIE Wireless program.
The Expert Level
Both the CCIE and the CWNE are labeled as expert certifications but the two programs differ in how they qualify experts. With CWNP you need to pass all of the professional level certifications, prove you have at least 3 years of experience and are working on actual wireless designs. You submit an application proving this and a board designates you as expert.
With Cisco once you pass all of the exams at the professional level, this is typically also at the 3-year experience mark, then you begin your progress towards expert. CCIE requires you to pass an additional written exam to qualify you are at a high enough level to attempt their expert hands-on lab exam. This exam requires you to go through an 8-hour lab where you must configure, diagnose and troubleshoot live equipment. Most people are at the 5-year experience mark prior to accomplishing the CCIE. CWNP does not require this, the certification is vendor neutral so it would be somewhat impossible to replicate the same hands-on certification without requiring vendor specific knowledge.
This does not mean one certification is necessarily more valuable than the other. There are approximately 400 CCIE wireless and 200 CWNEs in the world, so both are in high demand. As a matter of fact, in conversations with the executive staff at CWNP they openly discuss that their goal is not to compete with Cisco, they are vendor neutral so they work with all of the wireless vendors, including Cisco. On the other side Cisco regularly hires and trains engineers in the CWNP program. The best and most valuable certification is to be dual certified as a CCIE Wireless and CWNE.
As part of the CWNE program they instituted a continuing education model. Once certified as a CWNE you have to fulfill a certain number of requirements per year through training, active projects, publishing content, etc. As long as you are doing these things and actively working with wireless you will maintain your CWNE. The CCIE on the other hand requires you to take the expert written exam every 3 years.
"Thank you for your partnership and for promoting our certifications. We appreciate your efforts much." –Tom Carpenter, CTO, CWNP
CWNP Is Bringing Continuing Education To The Mainstream It Certification Market
During a recent conversation with Brad Crump, the President of CertiTrek and CWNP, and Rameshwar Nigam, General Manager of CWNP, we were strategizing about the program and how we could improve and move the industry forward. During this conversation, we were discussing a recent announcement that CWNP made concerning their goals with bringing the continuing education model down to the professional level.
Personally, I feel Brad and Ram are going to set the tone in the market and feel we will all see major vendors follow in their footsteps. As of September this year, once you pass a professional level exam such as CWSP, CWDP or CWAP you can choose to re-certify in the classic way of taking an exam every three years or you can enroll into the continuing education program. In this program you will be required to meet certain requirements, which should be relatively easy to do each year if you are training and executing wireless duties on a regular basis. In addition, you will be required to pay an annual “membership fee”. As long as you keep this current you would never have to take another exam again. The cost calculations come out to be comparable between the continuing education program and the traditional process (even with all three professional certifications), assuming of course that you would pass them all in one attempt.
They have brought an industry IT certification program into the same model as other industry accreditations. We are strongly recommending that our students pursue this path going forward. We work with individuals weekly that have waited too long or they struggle with exams and end up losing their certifications. Personally, I have let 50 or more certifications lapse over the years, all because they lost their importance based on how my career has progressed. Had I been able to do a program like this they would all still be current. I have never stopped doing the work or training, I just lost the desire to keep going back and re-certifying with exams.
"Terry is a very knowledgeable Network Architect with extensive experience. He was a pleasure to work with and was very detail and results oriented." -Sachi Sambandan, SVP of Engineering, Gigamon
As we progress this with CWNP I will continue to be a voice into Cisco and the other vendors we work with to provide leadership in how they could also adapt this approach.
NC-Expert is Different
At NC-Expert, we are a unique group of executives, trainers and experts looking to create a very unique training company. I have personally worked directly with many of the executives across Cisco in using training to move the industry forward. I work regularly with the product teams to help push their emerging technologies and products to the market, this is one of the reasons many have never heard of us. We have been working behind the scenes for many years with large vendors, such as Cisco, training their internal engineers, sales teams and executives on how to articulate business and technical value with their solutions. We have worked with Cisco from the time many of these products were introduced in the market. We are regularly used to help do the initial product and go to market programs that define the messages and content that eventually makes it into the main stream certification programs years later.
Our team was used to write and create the Cisco CCNP wireless program that is available today and we were the first Cisco Learning Partner to go to market with a CCIE Wireless 3.0 program that was endorsed by the CCIE Wireless program team and the Wireless Business Units. We also develop exclusive job role based programs that train in depth on specific technologies, standards and products.
“I have worked with Terry on several Cisco-related training projects. He partners well with others, is able to interpret the goal and make it happen. He has handled both sales and technical training across all levels of wireless. Terry helped Cisco grow the business by running programs for internal and partner System Engineers to make them capable of designing and deploying wireless networks. He has demonstrated the capability to work with any level of client at a global capacity.” –Sharon Redfoot, Snr Mgr, Cisco Wireless Networking Group
From a company perspective we want to be a lone voice in the market that we hire only the top tier of talent yet charge the lowest prices. I feel that training should always be measured against a Return on Investment. The price you pay for the training should be relative to the return you get from the skills you learn. This is how I determine our pricing and programs. We offer programs to make it possible for you to get both Cisco and CWNP in parallel, giving you the best return.
We also have a CWNE Academy that takes an individual from CWTS to CWNE. We price the courses as a bundle, offer self-study webinars and CWNE workshops to help those that struggle with the written portions of the CWNE application. The one flaw to the program is you have to submit a package that includes published works and three 500 word essays in English. We know many people struggle with writing and for others written English is not their native language. We can help with this.
"Terry is that rare breed of senior network professional that brings both seasoned, global architecture experience and gritty, no-nonsense business acumen to table. Regardless of the project or directive, Terry always pushes full steam ahead. Terry also possesses the ability to communicate and translate complex technical solutions into common sense business solutions that senior IT managers can sell to their respective business lines." - Jason Tavares, US Head of Eng, Nomura Securities
For CCIE, we do the same thing, we are one of only three Cisco Learning partners worldwide that offer both of the CCIE 360 programs for R&S and Collaboration in addition to our CCIE Wireless, Security and CCDE programs. Our motto is Experts Creating Experts, across our small but specialized team we currently have all 6 CCIE specialties and CCDE represented, 20+ separate CCIE certifications, multiple CWNP and CWNEs and certified trainers for Cisco and CWNP. We have CCIEs that were first certified over 15 years ago.
However, even though this is who we are we are also very approachable and down to earth, simply said CCIE and CWNE don’t impress us anymore they are not a destination nor are they even a current status they are designations we earned years ago. We all got the t-shirts, stained them and wore holes in them. We don’t want that to be what sets us apart, we rather be the ones that celebrate that our customers are earning the certifications. Since we have the experience we can help you get to where we are.
"Terry has been instrumental to fine tuning Cisco's feature set to optimize high performance data centers. Terry pushed technical requirements effectively and challenged our proposed solutions until we got it right. Terry's feedback sparked innovative ideas which are now part of the baseline for high performance networks." - Victor Moreno, Distinguished Eng, Cisco
Too many engineers in the market feel they are better than others because of some exam they have passed or what their "number" is, to us we know, while it is a great achievement, what you do afterwards is more impressive. So we aim to make sure we are truly creating experts not just certification numbers.
As the CEO, I personally sit down with every CCIE, CCDE or CWNE candidate and customize a unique plan for that person. It is that important to the image I want to create that I spend on average 5-10 hours per week advising and customizing packages for all of our future experts. Success for me is not making profit it is seeing people we have helped out there changing the market and driving it forward. I never want us to be so big that I can’t get to know the people that choose us as their training company.
Training after all is about the future and should be exciting, this is what I have chosen to invest in, helping people become better versions of themselves. If I am successful I will see hundreds of people in the market in the years to come that refer people back to us, not just because we are smart or have impressive backgrounds, rather they will recommend people to us because they know we will take care of them and help them achieve their own goals in life.
"In my opinion Terry is probably one of the best Architects I have had the pleasure of working with. He has this remarkable ability to provide management with the visibility to drive the business forward and lower costs. Apart from being able to manage the right expectations, he is a great team leader and motivates his team to complete the project (no matter what the size) successfully within tight deadlines. Terry is extremely technical, and he carries the depth and breadth of knowledge to work with vendors to ensure the right architectural decision is made for the business." -Ashwin Kohli, VP of System Engineering, Arista
If you have ever thought about achieving CCIE, CCDE or CWNE but have never went for it I encourage you to reach out to me, the goal you want to achieve is possible. We will walk you through the process from start to finish.
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