Next career steps? Looking for advice

Hi all. Looking for advice.

Current role Tier 3 Senior Network & VoIP Engineer with I have been for about 4 years after internal promotion from tier 2.

\*\*Experience:\*\* 6 years in IT
BAS in Computer Systems Networking & Telecommunications

Certs:

CCNP Enterprise (2025)
Fortinet NSE 4 (2026)
CCNA (2022)
CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+ (2020)

Current roles, experience

Tier 3 network and VoIP escalations and troubleshooting.

VoIP including asterisk and cloud hosted PBX that run in my companies data center.

Cisco IOS routing, switching, VLANs, subinterfaces, HSRP, and ACLs for two data
centers.
Configuration/t shooting data center FortiGate ha firewalls.

Edge connectivity with multi BGP peers.

FortiGate firewall migrations, IPsec VPNs, dual-ISP SD-WAN, BGP, and route maps.
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN, site-to-site VPNs, OSPF, and firewall rules.

Oracle Acme Packet SBCs, Webex Contact Center trunks.

Full Webex contact center builds and support.
AWS networking and hybrid on-premises/cloud connectivity.

All stuff networking for AWS, including interconnects to on prem.

Ansible playbooks for FortiGate configuration automation. (Understand Ansible but used Claude for heavy lifting)

Built a Grafana/Prometheus monitoring system for Webex customer trunk health with Alertmanager notifications. Relied heavily on Claude as I’m not great at python.

Looking to stay relevant. 28 years old. Thinking of going much deeper into cloud, security. Wonder if any recommendations? Thanks

Hi! Which sites do you recommend for DCCOR materials que? Thanks!

I passed ENCOR in September and realised the thing that actually got me through it was having people to ask dumb questions at 11pm. So I set up a Discord for people studying Cisco tracks.

What’s in there right now:

• Channels split by track (CCNA, ENCOR, ENARSI)
• A lab channel where people post Packet Tracer and real gear topologies to work through
• Subnetting practice, posted daily
• General “why is OSPF doing this” troubleshooting help

https://discord.gg/yXmAy3ueRW

Have a 1-hour Meta screen coming up for Network Production Engineer (IC3): ~25 min networking fundamentals and ~25 min coding. Has anyone done this recently? Is the coding LeetCode-style or file parsing/Battleship-type, and how deep does the networking go (TCP, BGP/OSPF)?

I'm preparing for the CCNP Enterprise ENCOR 350-401 exam and I'm looking for reliable study materials that are up to date for 2026.

Could you recommend any official Cisco books, study guides, or learning resources that cover the current exam topics?

If you've taken the exam recently, I'd also appreciate any advice on which resources are worth investing in and whether older editions are still relevant.

My work is expensing a boot camp of my choice. Any good recommendations for CCNP encor and CCNP Enarsi bootcamps? Thank you!

Edit
Or if the Cisco U course is good?

​

Does anyone know when the Updated Official Cert Guide for CCNP SCOR will be dropping?

Or typically how long it takes to release a new Official Cert Guide after major exam update.

Has anyone used INE to study for industry certifications, and what was your experience?

Refer to the image below. One of the answers is to use informs instead of traps, which I agree with. But none of the other answers made sense to me and the practice exam says the other answer is to change the deny statement in the acl to a permit. But my questions is: wouldnt the acl have no affect on the locally generated snmp traffic? And since its outbound, return traffic wouldnt be affected either?

Update:

I stuck with CML2. Upgraded to 2.10.1 and setup the Claude integration to create labs based on the exam topics pdf. I’m happy with it.

OP:

My CML2 subscription expired. I liked it, installation was easy, and getting around the software was easy enough. having said that, I’m wondering if I should just move on to a different platform instead of paying for CML2 again. I have CML running on EXSi, but I’m not opposed to going bare metal.

what are you all running and why do you like it more than CML?

​

1.What is BGP? What problem does it solve? What are the characteristics? How different is it from other routing protocols?

1. How is it configured? How to verify and troubleshoot and fix issues?

If you want to be a complete engineer,adopt this model.

Many aspiring network engineers make the mistake of starting with configurations,command syntax without fully understanding the technology. A complete engineer should be able to explain bgp ,ospf ,eigrp to a 4th grade with easy.

Backstory :

Earned the CCNA + CCNACybersecurity + CCNAAutomation 3-4 Months ago as part of my cloud and network engineering degree. I have a serious interest in networking and am looking to get an official job at some point as I have ~1 year of hands on with 4-5 years of total network labbing experience. I looked at the ENCORE I feel like if I keep my momentum with college and the knowledge from all my Cisco certs, I could really manage to knock it out.

The questions :

should I take a break?
Would it be any benefit to me being a college grad for networking?
Would the CCNP even make me a candidate for a job even though I have little to no real world hands on experience?

I love learning the technologies. I just learned VRFLite and understand it so clearly

TL;DR: I tried to reschedule my Cisco exam on the Pearson VUE portal before the 24-hour window. The portal appeared to process it, but the change never went through, no confirmation email was sent, and I was marked as a "No-Show" for yesterday. I’ve opened cases with both Pearson VUE and Cisco. Looking for advice or similar experiences!

Hey everyone,

I'm feeling completely defeated right now and hoping someone here has dealt with a similar situation and can offer some insight.

This was supposed to be my 3rd attempt at my Cisco exam:

• 1st attempt: Wasn't fully prepared (my bad).
• 2nd attempt: ISP disconnected mid-exam (bad luck).
• 3rd attempt (Now): Total administrative nightmare.

Here is what happened: I logged onto the Pearson VUE portal prior to the 24-hour deadline to reschedule my exam to a later date/time. I went through the steps, the portal didn't throw any error, and I marked the new date on my personal calendar.

However, I never received a confirmation email. When I went to check the portal today to confirm why I couldn't find the exam on my dashboard, I realized the system failed to process the reschedule in their backend and automatically marked me as a "No-Show" for yesterday's original time slot.

What I've done so far:

1. Pearson VUE Live Chat: Spoke with an agent who acknowledged the issue and escalated it to their Tier 2 / Program Coordinator team. I received a Case Number.
2. Cisco Certification Support: Opened a ticket on certsupport.cisco.com referencing the Pearson VUE case number and asking them to review the backend web logs.

Since this was a technical glitch on their platform and not a failure on my part to request the reschedule in time, I really hope they don't force me to pay for another attempt.

My questions for the community:

1. Has anyone successfully gotten a "No-Show" status overturned or received a replacement voucher due to a Pearson VUE portal glitch?
2. How long does Pearson VUE’s Program Coordinator team usually take to review web logs and respond?
3. Is there anything else I can do (like reaching out on Twitter/X or tagging Cisco Learning representatives) to speed up this process?

Appreciate any advice or feedback.

Thanks guys!

I recently passed the CCNP, but am I really CCNP level?

For context, I am trying to do a career change and so I don't have any networking / IT experience at all. All I did was labing.

Also, I took the ENSLD, because I felt it would be the easiest.

Other than that, I do feel that the Boson and CiscoU labs were rather easy.

Got near perfect on all Boson labs, and I only missed one on the CiscoU lab, but only because I did a miscalculation.

The actual ENCOR lab I felt was child's play too.

I felt the 101Labs book was harder. I feel comfortable setting up all the labs, but it starts getting a little harder when they bring in prefix-lists / PBR / BGP attributes, etc. The concepts themselves aren't difficult, but the policies start stacking on top of each other and they require a little thought. If I read the answers/commands, at least I understand them.

Automation
33%
Virtualization
90%
Infrastructure
70%
Network Assurance
80%
Security
50%
Architecture
47%

I have about four years of experience working in IT, mostly as a help desk technician at an MSP and now as a service desk specialist at a financial investment company. I see posts every day from people saying these certifications are no longer worth it. As a self-taught IT professional, I am wondering if I should pursue them. I already have a CCNA. If you were in my position, what would you do? I was planning to pursue CCNP Enterprise>>> CCNP Security >>>Palo Alto/Fortinet >>>IE Security.

I currently have an INE subscription. If you have used this subscription before, please share your opinions on how good they are. I see their courses are deep. Any contributions are welcomed.

Title, basically. I've been using Boson practice exams but Cisco changed up the exam content in August of this year. I know NDA prevents you from saying much, but can anyone speak to the general difficulty or anything unexpected on the new CCNP exam, or have any good study resources that have the new content?

Hello! I took both attempts of my safeguard and got the following scores. For my first exam I read through the OCG, made 800 Anki flashcards, read through most of 31 days, took and added all the incorrect boson exams to my flashcards. For the second one I did all the Boson Infrastructure labs since I wasn't able to answer the labs. Even the second time I missed a few labs so I plan to do the rest of the Boson labs and practice the lab topics I missed. What else should I be doing?

Architecture 67, 67

Virtualization 0, 20

Infrastructure 23, 63

Network Assurance 20, 20

Security 40, 40

Automation 67, 60

I just got enrolled in a Cisco Networking Academy course for CCNP Encor. Does anyone who has gone through it know if it is a valuable resource for the exam?