The other day my daughter asked me what I did for a living.  It had been a particularly challenging day so my immediate response was “TROUBLESHOOTING” (yes – in a loud voice!).  Those of you who work on networks know troubleshooting skills are critical; the ability to address problems on the network quickly and effectively ensures smoother and more profitable operations.  Juniper is pleased to introduce a series of courses and Juniper Network certifications that go beyond the JNCIP level troubleshooting knowledge – focusing on advance troubleshooting topics.  There will be three certifications in the Juniper Networks Certified Support track – all at the Professional level. 

In my two years of major in College, we were taught Cisco IOS. After graduation, I landed a job that was different from the environment that I was used to. The company that offered me an opportunity is actually a Juniper Networks Partner who does not offer the equipment of the network vendor that I learned in school. 

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Since I've been working with Juniper products for the past few years, I thought it was time that I bite the bullet and get certified! I might as well, right? I know some people really love certifications, and, to them ...getting as many as possible is almost like a hobby. I like them too, but it has been a while since I've studied for/taken an exam.

Some people that I talked to were pretty surprised to find out that I didn't have a Juniper certification since I am such a big advocate of their products and use them in my day-to-day job responsibilities.

I have always been a big believer in life-long learning or ongoing education in my chosen spheres of work.  For most of my engineering career this has taken the form of reading books, trade publications and doing lab exercises to keep my knowledge current for areas that affect my work.  This has worked well for me in general and I’ve been able to apply that new found knowledge along the way.

I just finished analyzing responses to our third annual Juniper Networks Certification Program (JNCP) audience survey. This is always an important activity for me as it is my best opportunity to hear what you – the Juniper certified audience – have to say about the value of your Juniper certification.

Over 6000 individuals responded to the survey this year. The results again show that the Juniper Networks training and certification process significantly enhances your job performance and career potential.

After passing JNCIA-Junos I immediately set about studying for JNCIS-ENT. A great thing about studying for JNCIS is that Juniper continue their “Fast Track” program to this certification level also. This means that you have free access to all the study material, which is good, but one important study point I could take away from studying JNICA, was that printing out these study guides produced a rather heavy binder.

“Fast Track” is an amazing program that allows network engineers, with previous experience from other vendors, to learn Junos but without having to go through all the basics such as subnetting and the OSI model a second time.  This program is cleverly designed to build on the knowledge already acquired to get you up to speed as quickly as possible.  In this instalment I discuss how I utilised this program to progress to the first certification stage, JNCIA-Junos.

I’ve always been a strong believer in getting the right training that will benefit you in your career.  I’m not talking about the training your supervisor makes you take, like those “team building” days out where you fall back and your colleagues catch you, or drop you if they didn’t like you; I’m referring to the training that, when it’s booked, you start to look forward to and get excited over and this is my 3 part story about my path to Juniper certification.

At Juniper Networks we recognize the investments you all made to acquire your Juniper Networks certification. We protect this investment with a comprehensive and robust exam security program. I like to call it our “piece of the PIE” (Protect, Investigate, Enforce)!

After studying Computer Systems Engineering at university and starting my career with a small Microsoft partner, I decided I wanted to build on the advanced networks and information security courses I studied at university and specialise in network security. Since then I’ve worked at COMPUTERLINKS for five years, working primarily with Juniper Networks and also another vendor in the ADN space.  Although I’m employed as a support engineer, I work across our support, presales and consulting teams as a subject matter expert for these two vendors.

I’ve been working with SRX services gateways and also EX switches since they were released, and used a mix of self-study and the instructor-led JIR and AJSEC courses at COMPUTERLINKS’ London-based training centre to prepare for the pre-requisite exams for my JNCIE certification. I passed my JNCIP-SEC certification at the first attempt on the 31st October 2011 and more or less immediately decided I wanted to pursue the JNCIE-SEC certification and to take my knowledge of Junos Security to the next level. I booked my exam for the 23rd January 2012 to give me a target to work towards.

This is a guest blog post. Views expressed in this post are original thoughts posted by David Roy, IP/MPLS NOC Engineer at Orange. These views are his own and in no way do they represent the views of the company he works for.

My name is David Roy; I'm a NOC engineer at Orange France. I work every day with Juniper Networks routers like MX960 and T1600. I've already passed the JNCIE-SP track last year and my new challenge was to pass the enterprise track (aka. JNCIE-ENT). It was a complex challenge for me, because I work for a Service Provider and I had to play with protocols that I wouldn’t normally come across in our network (for example OSPF and PIMv6). 

As a premier training and services organization we delight in shaping ordinary network engineers and architects to become extraordinary in their profession.  We accomplish this daily in our classrooms as we bridge our expertise in real world applications with structured, hands-on classroom interaction.  Every day we are teaching engineers how to go out and 'build the cloud'.  It is ironic that to this point, all of our labs required access to physical equipment - at a significant expense. With Junosphere we can actually bring the cloud to the classroom to create a unique and bold learning environment using virtual networking labs that provide learners with full hands-on access to Juniper technology.  

I am often asked this question by Juniper customers, partners and employees.  What value will a technical certification have for me and for my company? My response to this question can be a little biased – I have managed technical certifications for almost 20 years in four different IT companies so technical certification is a bit of a passion for me. However, you don’t really want a biased response from the company sponsoring the certification. You want to know what your peers think!

To get that unbiased answer we surveyed over 7,000 network professionals that have gone through the process of earning a Juniper Networks certification. This survey was completed in November 2011 and included Juniper customers, partners and employees as well as students and people currently seeking employment.   Individuals were from all parts of the globe – 43% in APAC, 32% in EMEA and 25% in Americas.  An executive summary will be posted on J-Net in the next few weeks – but I wanted to give you a short preview of our key findings.

Hi, my name is David Roy; I have been working for Orange for the past four years in the Network Support team for the Domestic Backbone. Here’s a short story of my Juniper Networks certification journey, which took me just under two years to complete.

My Juniper certification journey started back in 2010 with the M/T track, which was the closest certification related to my job. At the time the books from Harry Reynolds were available and constituted most of my learning for this certification track, I found these to be awesome books, which helped me a lot. I would recommend that you try to get hold of these books if you can, you might have to try the second hand market on ebay. Next up was the JNCIS-M/T; to be honest I didn’t find this track so difficult. After that, I then prepared for the JNCIP-M/T Lab (actually, the P level of the old track was an eight hour lab exam.) To prepare myself for this exam I used a Junos emulation (called Olive), with ten logical systems. All topics for the P level are well implemented in Olive. The first lab was so impressive after two hours I passed, so to configure my topology and playing with several interfaces I was a little more relaxed and I finished the final exam in eight hours (no more, no less). The preparation of my JNCIE-M/T was done by using Olive again for the IGP/BGP/VPN configurations. Nevertheless, I used a real MX960 to prepare the L2VPN part (not well supported by Olive). The E level was much more difficult, the IGP topology was quite unstable. I was so stressed and I spent a lot of time debugging it, and unfortunately I didn't have time to finish the entire exam (so I lost critical points) a little disappointing at the time. Needless to say I didn't pass the JNCIE the first time. However, second time round for JNCIE I was much better prepared for the troubleshooting part as I had created more scenarios in my own lab, which I think armed me with a better understanding and knowledge going into the exam, I finished the exam on time and I passed the JNCIE-M/T in December 2010.

In my last blog (Recertification of JNCIA and JNCIS – A Path Well-Trodden) I laid out my plans for how I was going to try and resit a fistful of Juniper certifications. Things started well with re-certifying the JNCIS-SSL on the first go (well it is my pet subject), but life, but mostly work, intervened once again.  Firstly my supposedly “quiet” month of December was rudely interrupted by a training course which had been bumped and then there was a slew of proposals requiring attention. So, instead of having time to leisurely study for four exams (Junos, UAC, Firewalls & WX) I had scant time to study for one. Added to that, it suddenly occurred that if I wanted to complete the “Specialist” level JNCIS-FWV without having to redo the “Associate” level I had to do it before 31 December2011 when my prerequisite cert expired.  So, everything, but the firewall exam was pushed into 2012.

I thought it might be helpful to share some my experiences and rituals preparing for and sitting the exams.

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