There is no regulation that social personnel cannot take CCIE certification exams. To apply for the exams, you don’t need to meet any conditions and you can just go to the exam site to make an appointment.
The exams consist of two parts: the written exam and the lab exam. The written exam costs 250 US dollars and you can pay for it online directly with your credit card. After passing the written exam, you need to take part in the lab part which costs 1400 dollars.
Social personnel can apply for CCIE exams. CCIE certification has no requirements on candidates’ educational background, age, job, and so on. But you need to have an ID card or residence permit to prove your identity.
The full name of CCIE certification is Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert certification. It is an expert certification launched by Cisco in 1993. The CCIE certificate is recognized as the most authoritative certificate in the IT industry and the top certificate in the field of global Internetworking. The CCIE certificate has two states: active and inactive. In order to enable holders of the CCIE certificate to track new technologies and maintain the expert level of CCIE, Cisco has to re-certify them every three years since they have passed CCIE certification. CCIE experts have to be re-certified, otherwise, although they still have the CCIE number, their CCIE state will change from active to inactive, and the corresponding rights granted by Cisco will be lost. But their CCIE number is reserved forever. Strict certification rules have made the CCIE certificate one of the most valuable and respected certificates in the IT industry, and also one of the most difficult to obtain.
Cisco launched the CCIE exams in 1993. By the end of September 2011, there were more than 29,000 CCIE experts around the world and nearly 6,000 CCIE experts in the Chinese mainland. (The number of the latest CCIE expert minus 1024 is the total number of CCIE experts in the world.) The number of each CCIE expert is counted from CCIE#1024. In order to commemorate the hard CCIE Lab exam, Cisco determined that the CCIE Lab exam itself has a CCIE number (so CCIE Lab was marked with the first number CCIE#1024). So the first candidate to pass CCIE certification was CCIE#1025 (Stuart Biggs). But Stuart Biggs was the examiner of the Cisco CCIE exams at that time, so the real first candidate to pass CCIE certification is CCIE#1026 (Terry Slattery), CEO of Netcordia.
Obtaining the CCIE certificate not only proves that your technology has reached the level of experts and has been recognized and affirmed by the industry, but also is a symbol of your honor and a manifestation of your self-value. So passing CCIE certification has become the dream of every network technician. In order to provide customers with expert technical support, Cisco stipulates in its certification agent system that top certification agents must have a certain number of CCIE experts, which directly stimulates the demand for CCIE experts. In 1999, the annual salary of CCIE experts in the Chinese mainland was as high as 123,077 US dollars. Now in the system integration project, many business owners propose that the contractor must have CCIE experts to be qualified to undertake the project, which shows the high recognition CCIE experts receive in the industry.
If you want to pass CCIE certification, you must pass the written exam first, and then you can take the lab exam after obtaining the qualification. After passing the lab exam, you can finally become a CCIE expert. There are two ways to learn the content of CCIE and pass CCIE certification. The first way is self-study. In order to obtain a CCIE certificate through self-study, you must have more than two years of work experience, enough time and energy, and have a perfect experimental environment. In addition, the most important thing is that you must have perseverance and never give up your faith. The second way is to participate in CCIE training in London. Find a good CCIE certification training institution to participate in the training in your spare time or in full time, and make full use of the experimental equipment of the training institution. In a good learning atmosphere, students can not only exchange technologies with each other but also get guidance from the training institution’s CCIE experts to improve learning efficiency, which is a way to get twice the result with half the effort. There is no doubt that as long as they meet the requirements, they don’t need to care much about their educational background. But they may need a little more time than others.
The CCIE certificate is the top certificate in the Cisco certification system. To obtain it, candidates need to take the following exams:
- CCIE qualification exam fee (i.e. the written exam, 2.5 hours): 400 US dollars.
- CCIE lab exam fee (8-hour configuration): 1600 US dollars in Beijing test site; 1900 US dollars in the mobile test site.
