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14% of Cisco CCIEs appear to be inactive or suspended
Fri, 12/10/10 - 7:53pm    View comments

April 30, 2010 was the last time Cisco published its worldwide CCIE count. However alarmingly, that last count revealed that Cisco's most popular CCIE track, Routing and Switching, had fallen for the 5th consecutive time in a row, accumulating a total worldwide count loss of -192.

Cisco's last CCIE count also held this bombshell:

For the first time ever, Cisco's overall worldwide CCIE count had fallen, declining by -21 over a 2-month period. That had never happened before and Cisco discontinued publishing its worldwide CCIE count statistics from there on after.

So it's now been almost 8-months since Cisco made its CCIE statistics vanish and I'm quite pleased to see below that Marc La Porte of the Netherlands has been manually keeping track of Cisco's CCIE statistics with his CCIE Hall of Fame website, which was last updated on December 1, 2010.

What's stunned me is that Marc manually and very labor-intensively verifies with Cisco the current "CCIE Status" of the CCIEs listed in his count.

And what has Marc's hard work verifying current CCIE statuses revealed?

• 8.02% of the verifiable CCIEs listed were held by Cisco in its inactive status.

  Once a CCIE certification becomes inactive, individuals lose all CCIE benefits and CCIE privileges with Cisco.com until they retake both the written and the lab exam in order to restore their CCIE status.

• 6.14% of verifiable CCIEs listed were held by Cisco in its suspended status.

  Once a CCIE certification becomes suspended, individuals lose all CCIE benefits and CCIE privileges with Cisco.com until they recertify. After one year of suspended status, an individual's CCIE certification becomes inactive.

Anyway, unfortunately for me, Marc's CCIE Hall of Fame does not keep a history of its counts.

Nonetheless and most interestingly, Marc also is keeping count on Cisco's CCDE as well as CCA statistics.

So earlier this week Routing and Switching CCIE #8767 - Tony Brown (a CCDE wannabe), caught my attention when he blogged:

"One of the things I'm finding difficult with CCDE study is that, unlike CCIE, there's very little in the way of discussion or community.

"I tried starting a discussion on the Cisco Learning Network CCDE forum over the weekend, but I've only had one brief response so far. Prior to my posting, nothing had happened on the CCDE forum for over two weeks.

"I do have concerns that the whole CCDE programme could be pulled and I'm wasting my time."

Tony's blog got me stewing because Cisco sure hadn't been shy 2-months ago about pulling-the-plug on its highly prestigious CCVP and CCSP certifications.

So I asked well-known CCIE training expert and Routing and Switching CCIE #5244 - Wayne Lawson, his take on Tony Brown's CCDE concerns and got this reply:

"Well, for starters - we have a CCDE support list (similar to groupstudy) at www.OnlineStudyList.com.

"We also have a Facebook group that was created over a year ago with several hundred members.

"The problem, I see, with this certification - is that Cisco (as far as I know) doesn't have any reseller requirements that would drive the certification.

"We, as the leading CCIE training provider, feel that the CCDE, CCA and CCIE SP Operations are all certifications with extremely minimal interest.

"We haven't pursued training materials for these certifications, and won't, until Cisco does something to drive interest for these certifications."

View more CCIE Water Cooler Gossip as well as the Worldwide CCIE Count.

Related story:

Cisco CCIE recruiting appears to be a nasty dog eat dog struggle
 

What's your take on the large percentage of CCIEs that are either inactive or suspended?

Furthermore, do you think Cisco will pull the plug on its CCDE certification because of no interest?

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