Monday, October 28, 2019

Network engineer trying to decide if I should ditch my CCNP

Sorry if this is too career oreinted.

I've been a network engineer for about 5 years, but never got my CCNP. I landed a job where I'm building and in some cases designing networks for a real estate management company and just came on full time after a 6 month contract. I'm wondering if a CCNP is even worth it at this point. I've worked for Palo Alto Networks, Match.com, and now at my current job, with nothing but a CCNA. Granted I'm a quick learner, have leveraged my communication skills, and have become very proficient in different networking concepts. I understand routing more than switching, but probably firewalls more than all. I've worked with l2/l3 infrastructure in both enterprise/data center environments along with security devices like ASAs and Palo Altos. I'm very familiar with Cisco Nexus 5 and 9ks, ISRs, and will be starting projects on Cisco ISE and SDWAN in the coming months. Currently I'm working on migrating MPLS circuits and also replacing our Cisco ASAs in about 20 remote sites across the country. I do solar winds monitoring and maintenance and even have a little experience with network automation and Ansible.

With all that said, I'm wondering if I should ditch trying to get a CCNP. I really want to focus on getting my AWS certification and dedicate my time to mastering python for network automation. The only reason I was studying for my CCNP was to get a solid network engineering job, but at this point my experience shows my capacity and practical know how as an engineer. What say you reddit and hiring managers? I want to get into devops, but I also want leverage AWS for my own consulting business in the not so distant future. Thoughts?



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