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Once you’ve got your CCNA, you’re ready to move on to the next level, the Professional certifications. For years, Cisco had one Professional certification, the Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification. Over time, Cisco has expanded this level of certifications to include the Cisco Certified Security Professional (CCSP) and Cisco Certified Voice Professional (CCVP).

With security and voice being the two most rapidly expanding areas of today’s networks, some new CCNAs consider going after the CCSP or CCVP without first adding the CCNP to their resume.

While it’s temping to hurry up and get a Cisco security or voice certification, the best thing you can do for your networking career is achieve your CCNP certification first, then decide on the CCVP or CCSP.

Why? Because the CCNA is just the tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to routing and switching. It’s a very important accomplishment, and the CCNA is indeed the foundation of your networking career, but you need to add on to that level of understanding routing and switching before moving on to more specialized areas.

Two examples are OSPF and BGP. You learn about the theory of OSPF and some basic and intermediate configurations of that protocol in your CCNA studies, but the knowledge you acquire of OSPF in your CCNP studies is invaluable. As for BGP, there is no BGP in the CCNA curriculum, but it is a great idea to have some BGP knowledge in today’s networks. It’s also good for your career.

I know it is a huge temptation to go after the security and voice certifications while not paying attention to the CCNP. Do yourself a huge favor and add the tremendous amount of routing and switching knowledge needed for the CCNP to your knowledgebase, and you can then move on to the CCSP or CCVP. Even better, you’ll be better prepared to climb the biggest certification mountain around – the CCIE!

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Congratulations on your decision to earn your CCNP certification!  As a CCIE, I can tell you that Cisco certifications are both financially and personally rewarding.

To earn your CCNP, you first have to earn your CCNA certification.  Then you’re faced with a decision – take the three-exam CCNP path, or the four-exam path?   They’re both quite demanding, so let’s take a look at each path.

The four-exam CCNP path includes the Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks exam (BSCI), Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks exam (BCMSN), Building Cisco Remote Access Networks (BCRAN), and Cisco Internetwork Troubleshooting (CIT) exam.

The three-exam path combines the BSCI and BCMSN exams into a single exam, called the Composite exam.

I’m often asked what order I recommend taking the exams in.  After earning your CCNA, I recommend you begin studying for the BSCI exam immediately.  You will find the fundamentals you learned in your CCNA studies will help you a great deal with this exam.  You’re going to add to your CCNA knowledgebase quite a bit when it comes to OSPF and EIGRP, as well as being introduced to BGP.

I don’t have a preference between the BCMSN and BCRAN exams, but I do recommend you take the CIT exam last.  You’ll be using all the skills you learned in the first three exams to pass the CIT. It’s a very demanding exam, and it’s a little hard to troubleshoot technologies that you haven’t learned yet!

The CCNP is both financially and personally fulfilling.  Once you complete your CCNA studies, take a little breather and then get started on your CCNP studies.  The more you know, the more valuable you are in today’s ever-changing IT job market.

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Congratulations on your decision to earn your CCNP certification!  As a CCIE, I can tell you that Cisco certifications are both financially and personally rewarding.

To earn your CCNP, you first have to earn your CCNA certification.  Then you’re faced with a decision – take the three-exam CCNP path, or the four-exam path?   They’re both quite demanding, so let’s take a look at each path.

The four-exam CCNP path includes the Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks exam (BSCI), Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks exam (BCMSN), Building Cisco Remote Access Networks (BCRAN), and Cisco Internetwork Troubleshooting (CIT) exam.

The three-exam path combines the BSCI and BCMSN exams into a single exam, called the Composite exam.

I’m often asked what order I recommend taking the exams in.  After earning your CCNA, I recommend you begin studying for the BSCI exam immediately.  You will find the fundamentals you learned in your CCNA studies will help you a great deal with this exam.  You’re going to add to your CCNA knowledgebase quite a bit when it comes to OSPF and EIGRP, as well as being introduced to BGP.

I don’t have a preference between the BCMSN and BCRAN exams, but I do recommend you take the CIT exam last.  You’ll be using all the skills you learned in the first three exams to pass the CIT. It’s a very demanding exam, and it’s a little hard to troubleshoot technologies that you haven’t learned yet!

The CCNP is both financially and personally fulfilling.  Once you complete your CCNA studies, take a little breather and then get started on your CCNP studies.  The more you know, the more valuable you are in today’s ever-changing IT job market.

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When you’re studying for the CCNP certification, especially the BSCI exam, you must gain a solid understanding of BGP.  BGP isn’t just one of the biggest topics on the BSCI exam, it’s one of the largest.  BGP has a great many details that must be mastered for BSCI success, and those of you with one eye on the CCIE must learn the fundamentals of BGP now in order to build on those fundamentals at a later time.

Path attributes are a unique feature of BGP.  With interior gateway protocols such as OSPF and EIGRP, administrative distance is used as a tiebreaker when two routes to the same destination had different next-hop IP addresses but the same prefix length.  BGP uses path attributes to make this choice.

The first attribute considered by BGP is weight.  Weight is a Cisco-proprietary BGP attribute, so if you’re working in a multivendor environment you should work with another attribute to influence path selection.

The weight attribute is significant only to the router on which it is changed.  If you set a higher weight for a particular route in order to give it preference (a higher weight is preferred over a lower one), that weight is not advertised to other routers.

BGP uses categories such as “transitive”, “non-transitive”, “mandatory”, and “optional” to classify attributes.  Since weight is a locally significant Cisco-proprietary attribute, it does not all into any of these categories.
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Passing the BSCI exam and earning your CCNP certification demands that you add greatly to the networking skills foundation you created when you studied for your CCNA certification.  You learned quite a bit about static routing and default static routing when you passed the CCNA test, and it does seem like that should be all you need to know about static routing, right?

One thing you’ll learn as you continue to earn Cisco certifications is that there’s always something else to learn!  You may have heard the term “floating static route”, which does suggest some interesting mental pictures.  “Floating”?  Floating on what?

In a way, a floating static route is “floating” in your routing table.  A floating static route is a route that will be used only if routes for the same destination but with a lower administrative distance are removed from the table.  For example, you could be using an OSPF-discovered route as your primary route to a given destination, and the floating static route would serve as a backup route that would be used only if the OSPF route leaves the routing table.

Now, how can that happen?  After all, OSPF has an administrative distance of 110 and static routes have ADs of one or zero, depending on whether it’s configured with a next-hop IP address or a local exit interface.  One way or the other, 1 and 0 are still less than 110!

When you want to configure a floating static route, you must assign the route an AD higher than that of the primary route.  In this case, we’ve got to create a static route with an AD higher than 110.  We do this by using the “distance” option at the end of the “ip route” command.
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