Certification Advice and Tools that Develop Real Cisco® Skills
 
Friday, May 24, 2013

CCNP has its roots back as to 1998, when Cisco announced both CCNA and CCNP. As Cisco’s first Professional-level certification, CCNP has a solid reputation as a cert that implies a high level of skill.

 

CCNP has always had a heavy focus on routing and switching, with a variety of other topics. At times, the focus was on WAN topics and troubleshooting. In the CCNP from 2006-2010, troubleshooting was gone as an exam, but the exams covered security, QoS, and IP multicast.

 

Today’s CCNP certification requires just 3 exams, rather than the 4 exams of older CCNP certs. This version of CCNP focuses almost entirely on ROUTE and SWITCH skills. TSHOOT focuses on troubleshooting, with the majority of topics coming from the ROUTE and SWITCH topics.

 A Brief History of CCNP 

 

1998: Introduced: With ACRC, CLSC, CMTD, and CIT (topics: routing, switching, WAN, and troubleshooting, repesectively)
 

2001: Revised: some changes, particularly to the course and exam names,, but with essentially the same major topics. New names: BSCN, BCMSN, BCRAN, and CIT 
 

2006: Revised: Removed CIT, added ISCW and ONT, renamed BSCN to BSCI. (ONT: WLANs and QoS; ISCW: Security, Internet access, MPLS)
 

2010: Revised: Removed ISCW and ONT, added TSHOOT, renamed others to ROUTE and SWITCH

 

 Who Chooses CCNP? 

 

Who goes for CCENT as their end goal, instead of a side-effect of the two-exam path? Some examples:

 

  • Cisco partner engineers
     
  • Network engineers
     
  • Network designers
     
  • IT generalists
     
  • Students in Cisco Academies
     
  • Anyone focused on networking as a big part of their career

 

 To save $$, Read this!

 

Most individual CCNP products can be bought for less $$ in a Library. Check out the Cert Kits for each exam – they each contain 3 separate products. Also look for the CCNP Certification Library as well.

 
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