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Interview with the First Cisco CCIE in History: Terry Slattery
In August 1993, Terry Slattery became the first person to pass the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) certification exam.
At the time, Terry was helping lead CLI development and training as a Cisco consultant, and when he found out about the CCIE program he took the two day hands-on test to become CCIE #1026.
Now you might be wondering why he’s not CCIE#1 since he’s the first CCIE.
The truth is that the CCIE certifications actually start with the number 1024 — which is a common binary number, and not number 1.
As Terry describes on his blog, the lab was assigned the first number: CCIE #1024; Stuart Biggs, who created the CCIE exam, was awarded the second number: CCIE #1025; and Terry, being the first person to take and pass the CCIE exam, was awarded with CCIE #1026.
Terry Slattery on Cisco Certifications, Careers, Training and More
Q. What certifications do you see as the most valuable to someone just getting started in IT or hoping to advance their career?
A. The Cisco certifications have good market acceptance and recognition, which makes them valuable when you’re talking with employers. Because of this, they are likely to provide more value in a generic sense, such as in a job search. But if your employer is using Juniper equipment, then the Juniper certifications will be more valuable to your short-term career.
Q. What changes, if any, have you seen in the certification process since you became the first CCIE? Where do you see changes being made in the future?
A. There have been quite a few changes in the certification world since the CCIE was created. The Novell certification that preceded the CCIE used only a written test and gained a reputation as a “paper certification,” implying that you didn’t need any hands-on experience to become certified. The CCIE demonstrated that there was value in a hands-on cert. The lower-level Cisco certification tests now contain configuration exercises, adding an element of hands-on evaluation to their qualifications. I see the trend towards more real-world testing.
I also see a trend towards higher level certifications like the new Cisco Certified Architect. We may eventually see a certification suite that is similar to what doctors and lawyers use. I think it may be similar to the Professional Engineer licensing that you see in the Civil, Mechanical, and Electrical engineering professions.
Q. What types of training do you use or recommend to someone just getting started on a certification?
A. No single source of training is sufficient for everyone. I recommend that you research the various programs and find a style that works for you.
Join some of the online forums and study groups. Learn from other people. There are also a lot of good blogs where people who are studying are sharing what they have learned. A benefit of working with others is that the relationships that you develop will become beneficial later in your career.
Q. How did you get started in the field? What was your first certification? Your first networking job?
A. I started in networking while working at the US Naval Academy. It was a way to connect multiple Unix systems together. I did some of the first fiber optic over Ethernet in the region. There were no books or training available. I learned networking and TCP/IP from reading the RFCs and from people I met in the industry. One example was meeting and working with Mike Muuss, the author of Ping, and the people who were working with him at the Army Research Lab.
My first certification was the CCIE in August, 1993. My only other comparable qualification of merit is my Vanderbilt Electrical Engineering degree. In talking with the Cisco Certification team, they like to think of the CCDE as equivalent to a Masters degree and the Cisco Certified Architect as equivalent to a university doctorate degree.
Q. What are your thoughts on the new Cisco Certified Architect certification? Are you considering getting the new certification?
A. I think that it is the right direction to take the certification track and that more of the industry will begin to follow. It will allow employers and customers to validate whether the staff they are hiring meets certain basic knowledge requirements. However, it won’t replace doing an interview and making sure that the candidate knows the specific technologies that are being implemented.
I am considering whether I want to tackle the CCDE and Cisco Certified Architect. They each have a certain appeal to me and I know that I would learn a lot along the way to attempting the certifications, regardless of whether I pass.
Q. Do you think the CCIE is still as valuable as it was a decade ago? Do you think Cisco did the right thing adding a higher level of certification above the CCIE?
A. The value of the CCIE has fluctuated over the years. For a while the program focused on increasing the volume of certifications and the quality suffered. The test has been improved since then and the quality is much better. They have had to revise how the testing is performed in order to allow it to scale better and still retain the quality of the test.
The recent introduction of troubleshooting into the test takes us back to the two-day lab test in which the proctor broke your network during a break and you had to find and correct the problems. Bad cables, bad boards, software bugs, and configuration changes all made the lab test a real evaluation of a candidate’s ability to troubleshoot problems. The written test has improved and is more difficult, so the more qualified CCIEs are staying certified and the less qualified tend to drop out.
As I said above, I think that the newer certifications are the right direction. What will be interesting is to see what the industry does in another 15 years and whether someone decides that they need another certification and why. It will also be interesting to see how Cisco manages the testing process for the new certifications and whether they make it easier to achieve in order to get more people certified.
Q. What are you up to these days?
A. I am currently doing network management consulting with Chesapeake Netcraftsmen. It is a bunch of people from the old Chesapeake Computer Consultants (CCCI) training company that did Cisco training and consulting from 1990 through 2001.
My main focus is on network management designs and network assessments. I’ve also done consulting on QoS design and network troubleshooting to keep things interesting and to get some exposure to other aspects of networking that I don’t get when doing network management. I’m looking forward to the day when network management systems remove a lot of the drudgery and tedium from running enterprise networks.
Terry, thank you for taking the time to talk and answer some questions for TST readers.
About Terry Slattery
Terry Slattery is a Principal Consultant at Chesapeake Netcraftsmen, an advanced network consulting firm that specializes in high-profile and challenging network consulting jobs. Terry is consulting in network core switching and routing. He is the founder of Netcordia, inventor of NetMRI, and has been a successful technology innovator in networking during the past 20 years. He has a long history of network consulting and design work, including some of the first Cisco consulting and training on the east coast. As a consultant to Cisco, he led the development of the current Cisco IOS command line interface. Prior to Netcordia, Terry founded Chesapeake Computer Consultants, which became a Cisco premier training and consulting partner. At Chesapeake, he co-invented and patented the v-LAB system to provide hands-on access to real hardware for the hands-on component of internetwork training classes. Terry co-authored the successful McGraw-Hill text Advanced IP Routing in Cisco Networks, is the second CCIE (1026) awarded, and is a sought after industry speaker and advisor.
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Pete Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Very interesting ! The old school billing rates of early CCIEs must have been great in the 90s. What would one expect to bill at now ?