The Road, by James Knights, CCIE # 2990, NCDE (Wireless), NCSE (Switching)

When Cisco asked me to write a guest piece to go along with the 15th Anniversary of the CCIE Certification, I thought I could write about the experiences people go through to achieve the CCIE and call it “The Road to the CCIE”; however, I also thought people might be interested in reading about my experiences during the 2010 Winter Games (I had the privilege of being an SME working on the network) and maybe call it “The Road to the Games”. Being a CCIE was one of the key factors in my being selected as a “Subject Matter Expert”.

One common thread I noticed during all my years in networking, across all platforms and projects, is that if you don't keep your eye on the basics, they will come back and bite you. The basics, simple things like Spanning Tree, priority queuing, EIGRP, OSPF, nothing complicated; that is where, if you missed or forgot a step, you will have an outage. It will be unexpected, and while you are looking for all the things that you know can go wrong, some simple thing will be impacting your network.

I had a colleague who wanted to take on the CCIE-Security certification, and, it was part of my job to provide training and support to my team. He is an extremely bright and competent individual, who when it comes to Network Security, can run rings around most people. Yet, he couldn't understand why he would also be tested on things like IP, EIGRP, OSPF, Multicast, etc. The reason is: that regardless of whether you have a specialty (Security, Wireless, VOIP) or not, to be a CCIE you still have to master the basics. And believe me, all of us forget to, at one point or another; while we are out chasing zebras, the horses will quietly get away :-)

So I decided to call this: “The Road”. I'll throw in some Olympic references to keep it topical, but really discuss those basic things you need to keep an eye on. My motto is “what you don't know about <…pick a technology…> can hurt you”

- James Knights, CCIE # 2990, NCDE (Wireless), NCSE (Switching)

Source From: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/docs/DOC-7062