Random thoughts about the CCNA.

I passed it at the beginning of this month, the test center was quite shit, they gave me a marker that was end of life so I could not write on that tiny board for long. And to add insult to injury they gave me a qwerty which meant I had to type very slowly.

Now the exam in itself, I feel it was ok, the labs weren’t hard they were quite broad but that’s all, I don’t know if you had to write mem? I only did it 2 out of 3 labs.

Lot of memorization concerning proprietary protocols that I am certainly not going to use like EIGRP, PaGP or the cisco marketing bullshit with meraki, I got 2-3 questions on that and they weren’t technical just marketing.

I ended up speedrunning the exam I had 2:30 to do the exam, I only need 1:30, I thought I had failed but there you go.

The value of certs

Now I don’t think certs bring that much on the table, and I don’t think it"s limited to certs in IT but in general.

It really feels like it’s a business, with all those courses on youtube,udemy, paid exams…

Sure you do have to put in some work to get the damn paper, but it’s not really that hard, like I feel you could just study like a monkey the topic exams, ace the exam and still be not very useful in a real situation where you actually have to put into practice what you have supposedly learnt.

But hey if this can get me a job or atleast a foot in the door I’m not gonna complain I don’t actually have any formal education in IT, so let’s see how this will turn out.

I think I will try to pass the AWS devops and stop there with the certs while they don’t cost much compared to a year in college in the US it’s still 300$.