Cisco Career Certifications 2020: Meet the Brand New DevNet Certifications

On June 10 2019 at #CiscoLive2019 San Diego, Cisco announced one of the most substantial changes to Cisco Career Certifications portfolio since the inception of the program going all the way back to 1990s. Cisco flipped upside down, just about everything, that you know today about CCNA, CCNP and CCIE written and Lab exams.

If you have not caught up on the overall the details, I’d strongly suggest you to start with our Cisco Career Certifications CCNA, CCNP, CCIE 2020 Major Update – Everything You Need to Know post first. For specific details on CCIE exam changes, check out Cisco CCNP Core Technologies Track: Meet The New CCIE Written and Lab Exams. For CCNP exam changes, hop over to Cisco Career Certifications Professional Track 2020: Meet the NEW CCNP Program. For CCNA exam changes, browse over to Cisco Career Certifications Associate and Entry Tracks 2020: Meet the NEW CCNA Program.

In this article, I want to focus on the brand new Cisco Certified DevNet Associate and Cisco Certified DevNet Professional tracks.

Cisco also unveiled Cisco Certified DevNet Specialist track which is simply a rehash of DevNet Professional track exams. Cisco has also signaled that there will be a DevNet Expert level track as well, so we are only months away from witnessing someone claiming a CCDE? Cisco Certified DevNet Expert 🙂

In case if you didn’t know, Cisco DevNet is a developer community that was launched back in 2014. Thanks to Cisco’s giant platform, it now boasts over 400K members around the world. DevNet priorities include advancing Software-defined networking (SDN), security, and Internet of Things (IoT), amongst other things.

Top Reasons for the Introduction of New DevNet Track

As per Cisco, achieving Cisco Certified DevNet Professional certification proves your skills in developing and maintaining applications built on Cisco platforms.

With DevNet platform, Cisco is trying to maintain their dominance by building a rich developer ecosystem due to the fact that SDN and NFV have forever altered the scope of a vendor’s lock-in.

When Do the New Exams Go Live

New DevNet Associate and Professional exams go live on February 24, 2020. While Cisco has published detailed official blueprint exam topics for about ten DevNet exams, I expect more details to be hashed out as we get closer to 2020.

How to Become DevNet Certified (Associate, Professional, Specialist)

The target audience for DevNet is network engineers and software developers who are willing to write code for network applications as well as integration. As per Cisco, for developers who have one or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining applications that are built on Cisco platforms are the right fit for DevNet Associate DEVASC 200-901 exam. Again, as per Cisco, for developers who have three to five years of experiences with application development, operations, security, or infrastructure are the right fit for Cisco DevNet Specialist and Professional tracks. For software specialist, you need to choose your areas of focus from the following options.

• Core
• DevOps
• IoT
• WebEx

For automation specialist, you need to choose your areas of focus from the following options.

• Collaboration
• Data Center
• Enterprise
• Security
• Service Provider

For professional track, exam requirements are similar to CCNP track, i.e. you need to pass one core and one concentration exam. DEVCOR 350-901 is the core exam and you can select from one of eight concentration exams in order to complete your DevNet Professional certification. My personal favorites, in the concentration series, are 300-435 Automating and Programming Cisco Enterprise Solutions (ENAUTO) and 300-910 Implementing DevOps Solutions and Practices using Cisco Platforms (DEVOPS) exams.

Let me summarize.

DevNet Associate Certification: Pass DEVASC 200-901 exam.

DevNet Professional Certification: Pass two exams, DEVCOR 350-901 + One Concentration exam

DevNet Specialist: Pass DEVCOR 350-901 exam

DevNet Associate and Professional Track Exams Durations and Fees

DevNet Associate and Professional track exams would cost $300 USD. As per Cisco official exam blueprint, exam durations are set at 120 minutes with no indication for the number of questions that may appear in the exam.

DevNet Associate and Professional Track Exams Recertification Cycle

In the newer 2020 format, all Cisco Career Certifications will follow a three year recertification cycle and DevNet is no exception.

Key Takeaways

• The target audience for DevNet is network engineers and software developers who are willing to write code for network applications as well as integration. The new era of full stack networking is upon us!
• Looking at the exam topics, both DEVASC 200-901 and DEVCOR 350-901 exams only seem to include less than 20% of Cisco specific stuff, whereas the 80% is based on industry and open standard protocols and technologies.
• When it comes to the example use cases, DEVCOR 350-901 exam contains NO multi-vendor use cases. I think Cisco should consider at least including some examples from niche vendors (I want to say Arista EOS and Juniper JunOS, but that may be pushing my luck too far!)
• First of its kind, DevNet Associate 200-901 V1.0 Exam Cert Study Guide in the form of a comprehensive online course is now available at Full Stack Networker

Last but not least, Cisco also published a detailed FAQ to cover the most common questions as well as a migration tool to help learners figure out a path who may have half way to their next level certification. If you prefer listening over reading, you can head over to Cisco Learning Network podcast.

Please note that for some weird reason, post initial announcement, Cisco decided to update the DEVCOR (and CCNP) core exam numbers from 300-blah to 350-blah, so DEVCOR is now known as 350-901 exam.

Finally, I’d like to hear from you, what do you think about the new Cisco DevNet Certification? Is that a step in the right direction, or is that a mix bag? Leave your comments below.