TLDR: I am not talking about the CCNA material (which is great for learning networking, albeit a bit too much detail for software devs), I am asking about the certificate itself, is it worth it to spend months preparing for the certificate, spending $300 on it, passing it and then putting it on your resume? Does it matter if I am open to move to DevOps positions in the future?
Background: I am a self-taught Software dev with about 4 YOE, and in order to teach myself Networking & CyberSecurity, stumbled upon this Jeremy IT Labs UT Course on CCNA. The course has been tremendously helpful in teaching me how networks actually work. It has a lot more detail than I what I needed (the ios cli, labs & configuration etc), but it has been worth it so far (I’m on day 55). However, now I am wondering if I should spend the money and effort to actually get the CCNA certificate itself. (I know 1 course is not enough to pass that certificate, I will have to spend many more hours diving into the details, memorizing things and making connections between concepts and topics)
In my opinion, no it’s not worth it. A CCNA and the related family of Cisco certifications really trains you to be a network engineer or work in ops in general. The certificate is not very valuable for a dev or devops role in general. The material itself goes over topics that are less valuable like spanning tree protocol. And it doesn’t much if anything beyond layer 4. DNS, load balancing, web protocols (HTTP, etc) are all more valuable topics to learn.
Now, the material that you’re learning isn’t wasteful, necessarily, but devops positions are not generally configuring routers and switches day-to-day, so I don’t view this as something valuable for software engineers even in devops roles.
Some of the topics that I find valuable - general TCP/IP in general and some of the routing protocols (namely BGP is the big one) - but the other stuff just requires passing knowledge that it exists and not much else. I would pick up a networking book and go over the topics in there instead of configuring switches and vlans.