Cisco Redesigned CCNA to CCNA Routing and Switching certification

[certforumz]

Cisco have recently announced, a redesign of its Associate-level certification programs including the evolution of the Cisco CCNA® certification to the CCNA Routing and Switching certification.

The redesign also enables the Associate-level Concentration certifications (Design, Routing and Switching, Security, Service Provider Operations, Voice, and Wireless) to better align with industry job roles.

What has changed?

1. CCNA has now been renamed to be 'CCNA Routing and Switching'.
2. 'CCNA Routing and Switching' is no longer a prerequisite to move onto the CCNA Concentrations.
3. All CCNA Concentrations require 2 exams to be passed for certification status. If there are not 2 exams specific to the concentration then ICND1 will be the first exam that students must pass (gaining themselves CCENT certification status) and then the exam specific to the concentration is the 2^nd exam (gaining the CCNA Concentration certification status). An example of this is CCNA Voice where the required exams are now ICND1 and ICOMM. Please see the attached illustration from Cisco which shows this.

CCNA Routing and Switching (CCNA R&S)

New exams for CCNA R&S have been released, the exam numbers for these are:

• ICND1 - 100-101
• ICND2 - 200-201
• CCNA Composite - 200-120

The old CCNA exams are still available until 30^th September 2013 to allow students who have already sat the 1.1 version courses to take the exams aligned to that version of the course.

Course Differences

What can students expect from the new courses?

A greater focus on higher level subjects such as ipv6 routing. A greater focus on lab work with exercises designed to facilitate maintenance of current network implementations. Less time is devoted the basic principles of networking such as the history and development. Students should find the course much more applicable to their everyday networking challenges.
The new Version 2 courses allow for more labs and troubleshooting, giving a better understanding of configuring and optimizing routers and switches.

What has improved in the version 2 releases?

The course makes better use of lab exercises by explaining the objectives and conclusions in greater detail. The course is up to date and reflects the common challenges faced by most technicians working in today's environment. The course is better structured and has a better flow making the learning process easier.

New features within the version 2 releases

Even more relevant lab exercises. Dropping of out of date subjects and focus on newer more applicable subjects, IPv6, relevant WAN technologies, advanced switching features, more in depth routing. There is much less focus on sub-netting, reflecting the fact most technicians use sub-netting calculators, for example.

New features include:

ICND1:

• VLANs
• Trunking
• InterVlan Routing
• VLSM
• ACL
• DCHP (commands)
• NAT (commands)
• NTP
• WAN - Point - to Point
• Dynamic Routing Protocol
• Single Area OSPF
• IPv6

ICND2:

• Understanding and Configuring Etherchannel
• Understanding Layer 3 Redundancy
• Understanding HSRP and Configuring HSRP
• IPv6 - Troubleshooting
• Multi Area OSPF
• GRE Tunnels
• SNMP
• Syslog
• Netflow
• Managing Cisco Devices (moved from ICND1)
• Licensing