INTRODUCTION to certifications

  Cisco offers three levels of general IT certification namely associate, proffesional and expert(where CCIE represents the highest level of achievement). There are seven different tracks for you to choose so that you can match your certification path to your job role or industry. Apart from the general IT certs cisco also offers IT certs in Focused Areas through which network proffesionals can enhance their core networking knowledge by achieving specialist certification in technologies such as security,IP telephony, and wireless.

the seven tracks and their respective certs in the three levels are as per the table:

General Certifications
Certification Paths	Associate	Professional	Expert
Routing & Switching	CCNA	CCNP	CCIE Routing & Switching
Design	CCNA & CCDA	CCDP	CCDE
Network Security	CCNA Security	CCSP	CCIE Security
Service Provider	CCNA	CCIP	CCIE Service Provider
Storage Networking	CCNA	CCNP	CCIE Storage Networking
Voice	CCNA Voice	CCVP	CCIE Voice
Wireless	CCNA Wireless	Coming Soon!	CCIE Wireless

CISCO CERTIFICATIONS

when i first began to work on networking, there were a lot of people who were against my decision. i was actually discouraged by many of them. i should thank them for showing some kind of dislike to my decision, because this is what instilled a sense or a feeling of challenge involved in taking up this as a career option and this lead to a high confidence level in myself. when i was deciding the certification offered by cisco that i should for i did not have proper awareness rather i was negligent in identifying the various certifications. there is similar kind of negligence and unwareness in many other students. so by my posts i wanna try and provide  a brief description of entry level certifications and later its extensions and hence get you a better insight into the networking world. i hope this overview on entry level certifications of cisco helps the reader in deciding which one he needs to go for among the offered.