The Academy has designed a new CCNA program to prepare you for today’s associate-level job roles in IT technologies. CCNA now includes security and automation and programmability. The program has one certification that covers a broad range of fundamentals for IT careers, with one exam and one training course to help you prepare. Newly retooled for the latest technologies and job roles, the CCNA training course and exam give you the foundation you need to take your career in any direction.

CCNA certification covers a wealth of topics, including:

• Network fundamentals
• Network access
• IP connectivity
• IP services
• Security fundamentals
• Automation and programmability

Cisco’s most popular credential from 2016 finally got an update. The 200-125 exam will be retired on February 23, 2020. (source) In addition to updating exam numbers from version 2.0 to 3.0. If you complete any current CCNA/CCDA certification before February 24, 2020, you’ll receive the new CCNA certification and a training badge in the corresponding technology area. As a reminder, there are no formal prerequisites for CCNA certification, but you should have Knowledge of basic IP addressing, one or more years of experience implementing and administering Cisco solutions, and a good understanding of network fundamentals before taking the exam. The usual slate of exams for CCNA: Routing and Switching requires taking the two ICND (Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices) exams and that essentially runs students through both ICND1 and ICND2 in a single sitting. In the following sections, we will list Exam Changes to the following topics that will occur in ICND1 and ICND2.

What is on the new Cisco CCNA Certification? 

Exam topics in ICND1 that are moved or removed:

• Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) topics have been moved to ICND2, because the Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is used to acquaint CCENT candidates with IP routing protocols.
• Dual IPv4/IPv6 stack coverage has been removed owing to the plethora of transition technologies now in use
• Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) has been removed

Exam topics that are added to ICND1:

• Infrastructure components and impact of their interactions for Firewalls, Access Points, & Wireless Controllers
• Collapsed Core architecture vs. three-tier architectures
• How to configure and verify IPv6 Stateless Address Auto Configuration (SLAAC)
• Anycast added to IPv6 addressing types covered
• Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) added to complement Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
• RIPv2 for IPv4 serves as primary focus for routing protocols
• DNS and DHCP related connectivity issues
• Syslog message logging for device monitoring
• Backing up and restoring device configurations

Exam topics in ICND2 that are moved or removed:

• Frame Relay and Serial WAN technology coverage is dropped
• VRRP and GLBP removed from First Hop Redundancy Protocols (only HSRP remains)

Exam topics that are added to ICND2:

• Dual- vs. single-homed Intelligent WAN topology options
• External BGP (eBGP) as used to connect Enterprise branches
• VPN topics now include DMVPN, Site-to-Site VPN, and Client VPN technologies in common Enterprise use
• How cloud resources are used in enterprise network architectures, including how cloud services affect network traffic paths and flows, common virtualized services and how they coexist with legacy infrastructure
• Basics of virtual network infrastructure (NFV)
• Awareness of programmable, software-defined network (SDN) architectures, including separation of control and data planes, and how a controller functions and communicates
• Using Path Trace application for ACLs
• Understanding QoS concepts as they related to marking, shaping and policing mechanisms for congestion management

Cisco CCNA v 3.0

Cisco CCNA v3.0 combines coverage for both ICND1 and ICND2 into a single exam, it incorporates all these changes above. If you already have Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician (CCENT) certification and would like to earn your CCNA, you have until February 23, 2020 to complete your CCNA certification in the current program. Moving forward on February 24, 2020 CCNA students will need to take the new exam to complete CCNA certification. This new single CCNA certification will replaces the current 10 CCNA certifications.

Popular Cisco Certifications offered at The Academy are the following: