Cisco IT Certifications

At one point in my career I was the Vice President of Finance and Technology at a largish financial institution. Our Wide Area Network (WAN) was all Cisco equipment so it was important to have staff that had earned a Cisco certification.

For many years we depended on outside vendors to supply support for our Cisco equipment but that could be problematic when a problem arose and we needed to wait for the vendor to arrive on site to correct the problem. So I decided to have staff get certified. As a reward for passing the certification I gave my employees a pay increase and announced in the employee newsletter the fact that certain employees were now Cisco certified IT professionals. Nice perks for the employees who made the effort to become certified.

Even though I was paying them more I felt that it was worth it. It improved the financial institution's branch uptime and those employees were able to bring me ideas on how to better manage our WAN.

We were able to implement technologies like VOIP that required our Cisco routers to be configured correctly it was great to have Cisco certified IT pros on staff. Switching from a regular phone system to VOIP was a great cost savings that more than paid for the certification costs and the pay increases that the employees earned.

These employees were given preferential treatment when applying for new positions because of their skills and willingness to learn. So be willing to learn and let your employer know it!