25 Years of CCIE
Cisco sent me a jacket last week for reaching 25 years as a CCIE.
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re not here for the jacket. You’re probably weighing whether to pursue the certification yourself and trying to decide whether it’s still worth it.
Here’s the honest answer: I can’t tell you yes or no in the abstract. But I can walk through how I’d think about it, because the decision really comes down to three questions: where you are in your career, what the certification is worth in today’s job market, and what AI is doing to the skills the exam actually tests.
Career timing. This may not be a popular opinion, given that the CCIE is an expert-level certification, but I think certifications earn their keep primarily during the first third of a career—assuming you’re planning to spend 30 to 40 years in the field.
If you’ve been doing this work for more than 20 years and you’re already the expert in the room, pursuing another credential to prove your expertise offers diminishing returns.
A mid-career pivot changes the analysis. Suppose you have a decade or more of experience in a different technology domain. In that case, the structured process of learning a broad set of protocols and technologies in depth can make a great deal of sense.
An expert-level certification can be particularly valuable when used to supplement that existing experience.
Market value. This part is simpler.
I recently saw a job posting for a role at a company that competes with Cisco. That company operates its own well-regarded certification program, so you might expect the posting to ask for it.
It didn’t.
The preferred credentials were CCIE and JNCIE—not the company’s own certification.
Sit with that. A competitor built an entire certification track of its own and still reached for rival credentials as shorthand for “this person can do the job.” That isn’t nostalgia. It is a hiring organization with no incentive to flatter Cisco or Juniper deciding that those letters remain an efficient way to signal technical capability.
My advice is to examine job postings for the kinds of roles you want over a long period before deciding to invest in any particular certification program.
AI and the CCIE. One caveat: I sat for the Routing & Switching and Service Provider lab exams in 2001 and 2009.
Today’s lab is still a timed, hands-on exam. Whatever else it measures, that format inevitably rewards candidates who can make sound design decisions and work efficiently from the command line.
Will that kind of command-line fluency matter in ten years?
A decade ago, the prevailing theory was that automation would have eliminated much of it by now. Automation has come a long way, and the CLI is still very much alive.
But watching AI models operate during the first half of 2026 has changed my answer. Memorizing thousands of syntax combinations is beginning to look like a skill on its way out.
I saw real evidence of that the first time I had Claude Code SSH into a router in my lab, troubleshoot a problem, and adjust the configuration. It is difficult to convey in writing. You have to sit in front of it and watch it happen. It feels like science fiction.
For what it’s worth, that same session also reassured me somewhat. I spent a fair amount of time arguing with Claude. Some of its ideas were bad, and it went down more than one rabbit hole. I had to keep pulling it back on track—while paying for the tokens it was burning along the way.
My working assumption is that we will still need humans steering these tools for some time. If the specific CCIE track you select helps build the deep protocol understanding required to do that steering, then it retains value in the AI era as well.
TL;DR: If you’re less than ten years into a networking career, my advice is simple: choose the hardest worthwhile target you can find and go learn it. CCIE, or something else.
Don’t delay.
This content is created independently and is not sponsored by or affiliated with any technology organization. All opinions are my own.