So, Let's talk a little bit about Cisco, Certifications and CCNA in general. Ccna was the beginning certification that Cisco released many years ago, And it has blossomed since then is often considered the baseline knowledge for anyone involved in networking. Even those in server related things. It's a great curriculum to go through to understand how anything applications communicate across the internet, How your network works in any fashion, Even if you're a server guy. It's it's useful, So CCNA is considered the baseline level of knowledge that almost everyone should know, Or at least in my opinion, Everyone should know in some way.
When I first took it, It really opened my mind to all the things that are happening behind the scenes that you don't think about when we get into it later on. In the later articles, You'll see it the amount of communications involved, For simply it is opening a web page is, Is amazing and and to really understand, What's happening behind the scenes makes you a better person, A better IT professional, Because you'll have a better understanding. As to where something may go wrong, A little by understanding this core technology you'll understand where things may break and what t may look like when t break, And it really it helps you it really does.
I really, I always recommend CC n8, Almost everybody to start. It really doesn't matter what you're doing I mean, Even if you're into the computer science side of things, And you want to get into programming. There's a there's, A good chance, You're, Probably going to be working on some sort of application. That's going to need to communicate in some fashion over a network, Especially nowadays, You know if you are in a small team, There's a good chance, You're going to be working on something related to that.
So to understand how networking actually works is a good good thing to know. You know you don't necessarily have to go through everything, But you know to get an idea as to what's happening behind the scenes is great, So everything is blossomed since CCNA and we now have various levels of certification. So we have the entry level associate level. Professional expert and now we have this new level that came about a year or two ago, Or something like that, The architect level.
So each level is obviously more difficult than the level before and sometimes there's more exams required than the level before kinda depends. But that's the general idea behind it, So you have the entry level here we have the one that we're going to look at here is C sense, So C sent early is half of CCNA. So if you take a look at C, Sent it's icnd1, So those who are familiar in any way with the CCNA certification system, You have icnd1 and two essentially or like the two halves of CCNA. So CCENT is the first half of CCNA. Really it's the core knowledge of how two networks operate the basics of using an iOS device.
You know a little bit of routing, Switching just real basic things, Subnetting things like that, How IP works and and that's the basic idea behind CCENT and then CCNA is the other half of it, Which goes into connecting to the way on serial links, Access lists, All Sorts of stuff like that and that gets into the more you know, Involve technical side of things. So I guess you could say if you wanted, If you are one of those people like I mentioned, To do programming or something like that, If you want to take anything out of this, Go for the first half articles or so that we have here, Which essentially Will cover CCENT, That's the core knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes and then the stuff later on. The second half is more hands-on, Lab type configuration and such so. If we go back we'll take a look at the CCNA t've read: t've read branded things from time to time.
So now CCNA is called CCNA routing and switching t've. These names change over time t every couple years, T'll refresh the information and the training material. This course is actually based off of the very latest version version 5 of their training material.
So I read through everything I took my own notes. I went through and you know, Redesigned my own curriculum around this new material that t're training you know go through the the requirement certification requirements that the testing information lists that are out there there's some great resources that we'll go over. That will help you along your way. So if we go and look at our CCNA routing and switching you'll see that there's three exams that are whoops, There are three exams that you could potentially take. You have the one big exam, The 200 - 120 or you can take, As we saw before, Icnd1, Which is CCENT and IC and D 2, Which is the CCNA exam.
Technically, I usually recommend people to take the one big exam actually because at least the way it used to work and still to this day, Works is, If you take the large exam, There'll, Be less material covered in detail. So if you're, Not so great in one spot, You'll have less questions on that area because t have to pack in so much into one exam. There's more questions on the larger exam, But it's more over more broad in its in its breadth.
If you do icnd1 and - t're a little bit more detailed on the specifics of that that exam and t get more involved in them. So if you want to space it out over time, You know and just take one and then take two for X and D 1 and 2, Then that's fine or if you wanted to sit through read all these articles do a bunch of lab work on your Own and then just boom go for the exam doing that first, One, There 200 - 120 is great and if you click on them, If you're on the Cisco website, T'll have additional resource links and we'll go over some additional tools and resources out there. There's the Cisco Learning Network t go through the exam topics here. T'll, Give you all the information as to what t're going to test you on my goal is in this article series is to go over all of these items and address everything that t want to test you on, As well as adding some stuff I've added some story of the internet, Coming up here, I've cut out some things that are redundant cisco, Likes to repeat themselves over and over again, Sometimes so.
I'Ve tweaked to what I feel is the best way of doing things, The the curriculum. Essentially, So that's we're going to go over here and the all the notes that I've taken and and script essentially, You could consider for behind the scenes here. I will have available in some fashion, For either a nominal fee or for something like that on the angel.
A demo website that you saw in the last article and most likely there'll be links in the description below if you're, Reading this on a streaming sites, Such as EveDumps or something like that. As for the recertification, So every every couple years you have to recertify. I believe right now to read three and you need to recertify your knowledge in CCNA and in order to do that, You have to either retake a similar level exam such as icnd2 or retake CCNA exam, Or you can actually take a higher level exam, And that Will refresh not only will get you one step closer to a higher level certification, But it will refresh all of the lower level certifications. So if you actually had CCNA CCNA wireless CCNA voice and then you went and took one ccnp route exam that would refresh all the ones below it, As well as give you credit of one third of ccnp, So it's actually their recertification policies.
Very nice and very flexible so as long as you're always retesting that same level or one above which frankly, I always like to go for one above that will refresh everything below it and you're good for another couple years, And it's actually really nice policy. So don't feel too uncertain about that when going for certifications of man every every year, I need to go and retest again and then it's such a pain and there's so much money involved and you can usually find either. You can either get your company to pay for the exam, Maybe or you can find vouchers out there for discounts. You know those ways of doing it, And it's really only a couple years in every few years you have to go.
Do that it's really not too bad. If you start to get a whole ton of certifications, Then then, And you have to every year, So you have to go and retest on one of them, But it's up to you how many you get . So if you just stick with the Cisco path, It actually is pretty easy and then, Of course, If you want to go higher than the professional level, You have the ultimate and CCIE that people always talk about.
There's two exams for that: there's a written and the lab exam, The lab one being the Big Kahuna that everyone complains about and t have to retest several times to win to get it. So there's there's great great amount of knowledge for you to learn in the Cisco certification system. There's there's really great resources out there and we'll go through some of those in the next article
Now that you have known about the fact, you must be attracted to achieving it. If you wish to have it, you must have to do lots and lots of studies, unless you have a good and reliable Cisco 300-725 Dumps provider like that of the EveDumps.