Okay. Dustin over at www.packetsmurf.org finally guilted me into doing this (not directly, but by posting his write-up of his CCIE journey).
Before we can examine my CCIE journey, though, we should examine from where I started, because from where you start has a large impact on how you should approach your CCIE.
Work Experience – The NMCI
I used to work at the Navy NOC in Norfolk, VA on the NMCI (Navy Marine Corps Intranet) contract. That’s where I started with networking as a freshly minted CCNA. It was an excellent crib environment to learn, because it was (and most likely, still is) heavily documented and subject to a mature change control process. Most changes are planned months in advance and put together by config engineering, so as a junior engineer a lot of the job involved inspecting change bundles for mistakes and impact, then applying changes during maintenance window. The other half of the work was proactive monitoring and incident management, but again, the Navy has a mature network monitoring and operations system in place.
While working and learning, I started progressing toward my CCNP R/S after about 6 months. It would take me another 9 months to finish, but I was able to get my CCNP R/S done without much trouble.
After a couple years, I started to notice that opportunities to do real engineering were scarce. Most changes required no deviation, and once you understood the Navy network, you realized how siloed and regimented everything was by necessity. This left little opportunity to continue to improve as a network engineer, and so I started looking elsewhere.
Work Experience – Global Enterprise
I interviewed at a fairly small (but global) company which had a very lean network team and great growth opportunities. The network team handled route/switch, collaboration, security, wireless and data center technologies and they were in dire need of talent. I was in dire need of real networking/engineering experience, so I signed on.
My first week on the job, I was given the task of building and developing policies for ACS 5.3 to replace a failing ACS 3 appliance. I knew nothing about ACS, but I figured it all out – how to use it for TACACS, wireless RADIUS auth for VPN and wireless.
It’s good that I figured it out so quickly, because it was pressed into service immediately after the SysAdmin team performed a Windows Active Directory domain functional upgrade which completely broke the old ACS server (We used AD for the user database).
Over the next 3.5 years, I gained an incredible amount of experience. Sometimes there were already designs in place, but often there were tech refreshes internationally to replace a completely flat network with proper infrastructure, necessitating a complete network redesign. I learned a ton about just about every solution Cisco has on offer, usually from zero to hero, and a ton about network design as well.
One thing my company never pushed or cared about was certification, however. They didn’t really care whether their engineers were certified, only that the business got done. Because of this, though I was leaps and bounds ahead in some technologies (and deficient in others we did not use), I did not consider starting on a journey to CCIE while I worked there.
Taking the Leap – Cisco Advanced Services
I interviewed with Cisco Advanced Services in August of 2016 with a dual CCIE named Steve Dippippo. I remember the interview over Webex very well. He was impressed with my technical knowledge, and he asked me flat out, “So why don’t you have your CCIE?” I explained that it wasn’t a priority for my employer, so I couldn’t make it my priority (for reasons we’ll explore in the next post). He seemed satisfied with that, but I think it’s because he knew that if I were hired with Cisco AS that would change very quickly.
He was right, it did. I started with Cisco AS in September of 2016, and just a few scant months later, after learning the job role, I started my CCIE journey.
In my next post, I’ll cover the checklist every one should consider when deciding whether to embark on a journey to the CCIE.
