22 October 2008

Why Take CCNA Exam?


So you haven't decided yet to take the Cisco CCNA exam, no time to study, too much works got in the way, etc.
Well I found something that might raise your spirit again in taking the CCNA exam.

First, why bother taking the exam? According to indeed.com the percentage of job vacancies in need of CCNA certified people have been growing wild in the last few years.
They search from millions of jobs from thousands of job sites about the CCNA required jobs, you can see from the graphic of indeed.com below:

Cisco CCNA Job Trends graph

From the looks of that chart, 50 plus percent growth of jobs in need for CCNA, WOW blur, the demand for CCNA certified are definitely won't run out in the next following few years.

So we know that there are still lots of jobs need CCNA, what about the salary? from indeed.com again, they provide the following graph about the CCNA income in a year:
The above graph depicts that CCNA salaries in the US have average salaries of US $75,000 per year.

Of course this depends also on the experience of the CCNA holders, most ten years experienced network engineers with CCNA certification can get this kind of salary.

What about CCNA salaries world wide? As I know in my country definitely won't reach that kind of number, but network engineers with CCNA certification are claiming that they got raise in their salaries.

Some interesting surveys by TCPmag.com can be read here. They regularly conduct salary survey on their readers. The fact is outstanding, just read the article, I know you'll gonna love it.

So what's the moral of this story? Get Cisco certified, the higher the better, average CCIE salaries are reported about US$102,000 - $116,000.

Even if you're living in a country like mine where the average salary of professionals are about US$250 - US$500 per month, you can always get in a project abroad if you have great resume. With no intention of bragging or anything, at the last project I was involved in, I can get way far beyond the average salaries in my country.

So good luck with your certifications.