Merry Christmas! (Even if slightly late...)
I absolutely agree. The certification by itself doesn't prove much
beyond a passing interest in networking and an ability to retain a fair
amount of information. I suspect it's mostly a question of creating some
kind of standard to judge applicants. It's also worth mentioning that I
bet that many HR departments are actively hunting for keywords such as
certifications acronyms.
It was just a bit sad to see the certification itself as the "real" goal
of the program.
Cheers!
On 12/25/2014 11:42 PM, Alain Hebert wrote:
Well let start with: Happy Holidays.
In my line of work anyone with a CCNA get put at the bottom of the pile =D
We're looking for proactive associates and found that applicants which
present themselves as a CCNA engineer foremost are only just that: Someone
that could follow the course and bother to pass it.
Best deal is to get Cisco 1000V image (or GNS) and a Virtual Server (about
$600 used with 72G of RAM lately, and you do not need huge amount of
disks) and start making test beds for real world needs.
The only drawback is that you may make the interviewer worried about his
own job =D
Good luck.
The Cisco "Networking Academy" program was used throughout my
"CEGEP"(End of high-school/first college year equivalent in the US)
education in Quebec. There was no deviation from the course work and the
aim was to get the student CCNA certified at the end.
On 12/25/2014 7:21 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Cisco as the basis of networking material? Does nobody use Comer,
Stallings, or Tannenbaum as basic texts anymore?
Miles Fidelman
Mike Jones wrote:
I am a university student that has just completed the first term of
the first year of a Computer Systems and Networks course. Apart from a
really out of place MATH module that did trig but not binary, it has
been reasonably well run so far. The binary is covered in a different
module, just not maths. The worst part of the course is actually the
core networking module, which is based on Cisco material. The cisco
material is HORRIBLE! those awkward "book" page things with the stupid
higherarchical menu. As for the content.. a scalable network is one
you can add hosts to, so what's a non-scalable network? will the
building collapse if i plug my laptop in?
As I have been following NANOG for years I do notice a lot of mistakes
or "over-simplifications" that show a clear distinction between the
theory in the university books and the reality on nanog, and
demonstrate the lecturers lack of real world exposure. As a simple
example, in IPv4 the goal is to conserve IP addresses therefore on
point to point links you use a /30 which only wastes 50% of the
address space. In the real world - /31's? but a /31 is impossible I
hear the lecturers say...
The entire campus is not only IPv4-only, but on the wifi network they
actually assign globally routable addresses, then block protocol 41,
so windows configures broken 6to4! Working IPv6 connectivity would at
least expose students to it a little and let them play with it...
Amoung the things I have heard so far: MAC Addresses are unique, IP
fragments should be blocked for security reasons, and the OSI model
only has 7 layers to worry about. All theoretically correct. All
wrong.
- Mike Jones
On 22 December 2014 at 09:13, Javier J <jav...@advancedmachines.us>
wrote:
Dear NANOG Members,
It has come to my attention, that higher learning institutions in
North
America are doing our young future colleagues a disservice.
I recently ran into a student of Southern New Hampshire University
enrolled
in the Networking/Telecom Management course and was shocked by what I
learned.
Not only are they skimming over new technologies such as BGP, MPLS
and the
fundamentals of TCP/IP that run the internet and the networks of the
world,
they were focusing on ATM , Frame Relay and other technologies that
are on
their way out the door and will probably be extinct by the time this
student graduates. They are teaching classful routing and skimming
over
CIDR. Is this indicative of the state of our education system as a
whole?
How is it this student doesn't know about OSPF and has never heard
of RIP?
If your network hardware is so old you need a crossover cable, it's
time to
upgrade. In this case, it’s time to upgrade our education system.
I didn't write this email on the sole experience of my conversation
with
one student, I wrote this email because I have noticed a pattern
emerging
over the years with other university students at other schools
across the
country. It’s just the countless times I have crossed paths with a
young IT
professional and was literally in shock listening to the things they
were
being taught. Teaching old technologies instead of teaching what is
currently being used benefits no one. Teaching classful and skipping
CIDR
is another thing that really gets my blood boiling.
Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what
IPv6 is?
What about unicast and multicast? I confirmed with one student half
way
through their studies that they were not properly taught how DNS
works, and
had no clue what the term “root servers� meant.
Am I crazy? Am I ranting? Doesn't this need to be addressed? …..and
if not
by us, then by whom? How can we fix this?
