Protecting the integrity of the CCIE lab - Verbal Interviews being tested

Brian Dennis over at Internetwork Experts blog caught wind of an interesting email from Cisco:

Dear Candidate:

On August 27, Cisco will introduce a pilot for the CCIE Routing and Switching lab exam in Beijing, China. The pilot will add a 10-minute interview that will assess the candidate’s ability to apply expert-level networking skills and knowledge to networking problems that are encountered on the job. After the lab orientation, a panel of three experts will conduct a verbal interview with each candidate, asking a series of expert-level networking questions (questions and answers will be in English). The ability to correctly answer these questions will affect the exam score. After completing the interview, the candidate will have the entire 8 hours to complete the lab portion of the exam. These scores will then be calculated and then combined for a total score which will decide a pass or a fail.

Our goal with this email is to let you know that your day will extend beyond the normal testing day by approximately one hour. The additional hour will be at the end of the day. We hope you find this interview process enlightening and helpful as we continue to strive for the standard the world has come to expect from CCIE.

In my opinion this change is both needed and appropriate. In the past couple years, the two main barriers to entry with the CCIE (access to gear, and knowledge) have been lowered with the abundance of training programs as well as dynamips and its derivatives for gear emulation. Where in the past you were looking at a minimum of $8,000 dollars for a full lab, now you can run it on your PC at home.

From what I see, this is encouraging engineers to get their CCIE’s earlier in their career. This in itself is not a bad thing. If an engineer has dedicated themselves to learning all the ins and outs of networking technology, then they really have earned the title. The problem comes when people want to take short cuts. They buy a lab of someone in China, or use other methods to get copies of the lab. To them, passing the lab and getting their number is all that is important, not truly becoming an expert in the technology.

While in the short term this may seem like the quick path to a good salary, in the long term everybody loses. Those who have cheated their way to their CCIE (while few and far between) end up devaluing the cert for the rest of us. And at the end of the day, they are just cheating themselves, and will lose their jobs when their true skills are tested.

It looks like Cisco is seeing the same thing that I have just talked about. This pilot program should go a long way into protecting the integrity of the CCIE for years to come.