Cisco certifications target business professionals eyeing software roles

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Trying to keep business professionals ahead of the rapidly changing technology environment, Cisco this week rolled out new business certificate and training packages.

The package includes a certification-level offering for what’s known as a client advocate or a Customer Success Manager. The other certification has to do with helping business professionals learn how to build and transform corporations into the digital environment.

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Training needs to reflect the rapidly evolving technical and non-technical environments and with this announcement we are focusing more on giving people the skills needed to perform jobs outside of the strictly technical world and more toward helping them with the soft skills they need to help the business grow, said Tejas Vashi, senior director, product strategy & marketing for Learning@Cisco.

Customer Success Manager (CuSM) Certification: Cisco says this certification is about building customer relationships. The foundation of Customer Success is based on increasing customer adoption of your product and driving retention and mitigating churn. While this has been in practice for software-driven businesses, it hasn’t been a big driver in the traditional enterprise world, Vashi said.

Specifically, Cisco says the certification provides a core set of fundamental skills to help ensure that customers achieve the desired business outcomes through their technology investments, to increase and expand adoption and ensure that customers see enough benefits to renew contracts. This includes a full instructor-led or virtual instructor-led program that will prepare learners for a certification exam at the specialist level.

Cisco is also offering Business Specialist certifications including: Enterprise IT Business Specialist; Business Specialist – For Sales Professionals; Business Value Specialist; Business Value Practitioner Specialist; and, Business IT Roadmap Specialist. Cisco says these certifications are aimed at helping IT organizations to understand motivations and desired business outcomes, help them architect and implement an approach that delivers the expected value, and effectively communicate how the technology investments enable the corporation to meet its strategic business objectives.

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The current announcements come on the heels of other new Cisco certifications and training for networking professionals. Announced this month, those new programs include:

Network Engineers

The Cisco NPDESI Specialist Certification is for those who hold an active CCNP or CCDP certification and want to learn crucial network programmability skills. It provides network engineers with a comprehensive soup-to-nuts curriculum to develop and validate automation and programming skills and directly addresses the evolving role of network engineers towards more programmability, automation and orchestration. Training for the exam is offered both as an instructor-led training workshop via Cisco Learning Partners, and as self-paced interactive training replete with videos, integrated labs and assessments.

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Cisco said it was also starting Programming for Network Engineers (PRNE), a new self-paced training designed to be of immediate value to network engineers looking to use network programming to simplify or automate tasks.PRNE is a recommended pre-requisite for the Cisco NPDESI Certification. It covers the fundamentals of Python programming, within the context of performing functions relevant to network engineers.

Application Developers

Cisco said it is revising its NPDEV Specialist certification to provide application developers with comprehensive curriculum to develop infrastructure programming skills. It includes instruction on data handling and formats, fundamentals of networking and network programmability, APIs and automation protocols, data models, operations, and controller platforms and protocols. When you pass the NPDEV or NPDESI exam, you recertify any existing CCNA or CCNP certifications.

Training for the NPDEV certification is being offered both as an instructor-led training workshop via Cisco Learning Partners, and as a self-paced interactive training that includes videos, integrated labs and assessments.

Cisco DNA

The new DNA Implementation Essentials (DNAIE) course supports networking professionals who are implementing Cisco Digital Network Architecture now. DNA offers integrated networking software—virtualization, automation, analytics, cloud service management and security under a single suite.

Cisco said professionals taking the five-day DNAIE training – available as an instructor-led training workshop via Cisco Learning Partners and as a self-paced interactive training that includes videos, integrated labs and assessments – will learn general concepts including the role of orchestration and automation enabled by controllers in DNA, integration with other technologies and security implementation.