Congratulations! If you're reading this Introduction, you've probably already decided to go for your Cisco certification. If you want to succeed as a technical person in the networking industry, you need to know Cisco. Cisco has a ridiculously high market share in the router and switch marketplace—more than 80 percent in some markets. In many geographies and markets around the world, networking equals Cisco. If you want to be taken seriously as a network engineer, Cisco certification makes sense.
Historically speaking, the first entry-level Cisco certification has been the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification, first offered in 1998. The first three versions of the CCNA certification (1998, 2000, and 2002) required that you pass a single exam to become certified. However, over time, the exam kept growing, both in the amount of material covered and the difficulty level of the questions. So, for the fourth major revision of the exams, announced in 2003, Cisco continued with a single certification (CCNA) but offered two certification options: a single exam option and a two-exam option. The two-exam option allowed people to study roughly half the material and then take and pass one exam before moving on to the next.
Cisco announced changes to the CCNA certification and exams in June 2007. This announcement includes many changes; here are the most notable:
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The exams collectively cover a broader range of topics.
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The exams increase the focus on proving the test taker's skills (as compared with just testing knowledge).
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Cisco created a new entry-level certification: Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician (CCENT).
For the current certifications, announced in June 2007, Cisco created the ICND1 (640-822) and ICND2 (640-816) exams, along with the CCNA (640-802) exam. To become CCNA certified, you can pass both the ICND1 and ICND2 exams, or just the CCNA exam. The CCNA exam simply covers all the topics on the ICND1 and ICND2 exams, giving you two options for gaining your CCNA certification. The two-exam path gives people with less experience a chance to study for a smaller set of topics at one time. The one-exam option provides a more cost-effective certification path for those who want to prepare for all the topics at once.
Although the two-exam option is useful for some certification candidates, Cisco designed the ICND1 exam with a much more important goal in mind. The CCNA certification grew to the point that it tested knowledge and skills beyond what an entry-level network technician would need. Cisco needed a certification that better reflected the skills required for entry-level networking jobs. So Cisco designed its Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices 1 (ICND1) course, and the corresponding ICND1 640-822 exam, to include the knowledge and skills most needed by an entry-level technician in a small Enterprise network. And so that you can prove that you have the skills required for those entry-level jobs, Cisco created a new certification, CCENT.