Anyone studying for their Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) exams will probably already know that the existing exams will change on January 30, 2015.  I currently find myself deciding if I should either try to cram for all three exams, ROUTE, SWITCH, and TSHOOT or if I should just wait until after the exams change.

Last year as I was contemplating my next career move I went out and secured a number of basic certifications.

When I landed my current job my new employer didn’t too place much weight on industry certifications but instead relied on my reputation within the industry and my many years of experience and success in deploying and managing large and small IT environments. Since my new employer had a sizable deployment of Cisco networking equipment I thought it would be a good idea to continue my training and secure my CCNP – the knowledge would actually be useful. Now more than 11 months later I need to decide if I’m going to try and cram in all three exams or if I should wait until after the exams change. Or perhaps I should just abandon my plans to achieve the CCNP.

Thankfully I know most of the material fairly well although I’ll need to dedicate a sizable amount of time refreshing my knowledge of all the various topics and details. I’ll also have to brush up on my binary math and subnetting topics which always come up on these exams. I’m getting excited about the challenge just writing about it here but I also need to take into account my already busy and packed schedule. This might be a great opportunity of putting GNS3 1.2 to the test, or even perhaps trying out Cisco VIRL.

What to do is the question? Any ideas? I’m thinking of going for it, I actually have some vacation time coming up that I’ll be able to use.

Cheers!
Note: This is a series of posts made under the Network Engineer in Retail 30 Days of Peak, this is post number 11 of 30. All the posts can be viewed from the 30in30 tag.