I've worked in IT since the year 2000. Since that time, I’ve met many hundreds of engineers, designers, installers, managers, and of course, many thousands of students in my courses and teaching on-site for large companies.
I’ve made a few observations over the years. One of the most important is that people tend to skip over the basics and jump into what they wanted to learn, such as firewalls, voice, server support, or whatever. I’ve also noticed that people tend to avoid stuff they perceive as hard, such as IPv6 addressing. It’s just human nature, I’m guessing.
The entire internet and your network runs on TCP/IP, and yet, many students and engineers have huge gaps in their understanding of this suite of protocols and services. They use it every day, all day long and yet don’t really understand what is going on under the hood of their network.
TCP/IP courses are actually pretty rare. Sure, it’s covered in part on CompTIA exams, such as A+ and Network+, but really only at a basic level. I guess you could pick up one of the classic TCP/IP manuals, such as Richard Stevens's TCP/IP Illustrated manual, but it can be pretty heavy reading.
One course seems to plug the gap, and in my opinion, is an absolute must have course no matter which route you choose to follow in your IT career. Here are 5 reasons why you need to get Wireshark certified:
- It’s hands on – not a huge amount of theory for this course. You start off by setting up preferences, and then you are right into analysing real traffic in real time.
- You get to understand how protocols work – when you see sessions established and then torn down, you can finally put theory into practice. Nothing is better than that.
- It’s relevant – have you ever had to troubleshoot network issues? Latency, poor performance, a failing network card, congestion? Can you name any other tool which will almost instantly give you evidence of what the issue is and where? Sure SNMP can help, but it won’t tell you what the issue is, just that there is one.
- You get recognition – how many Wireshark certified engineers have you met? Not many, I’m guessing. If you add that to your resume, I guarantee that employers will see that as a very desirable (read hireable) skill.
- Increased confidence – when I started out doing network support, I’d dread it when a customer asked for a sniffer to be added to the network to troubleshoot an issue. It was because I didn’t understand how to use them or interpret the data. Don’t let that happen to you.
With some effort, you could nail the Wireshark WCNA exam in around a month. It would be time very well spent.
If you want to get certified in Wireshark check out our WCNA training course.
Have fun.
Paul Browning
Hi Paul I would like to take wireshack course as well. But I’m in transit to the 60 days CCNA. I just doubtful to take on too much learning curve.
Now this is an interesting certification that I didn’t know existed.
I recently finished a contract at a large networking company in Silicon Valley. Because this was a entry-level support role, I already had the skills to do that job without knowing more about networking beyond the Network+ certification. But management was unwilling to train me because they were afraid I might get certified and leave for a competitor. Never mind that many employees were getting certified on company time and leaving because of the overall lack training.
I ended up installing Wireshark from the installer on PC laptops and from source code on Mac laptops without any clue on how to interpret what I was looking at from the over-the-air capture for wireless clients. The engineers were frustrated that I sent them OTAs with everything but they were unwilling to show me how to narrow down the results. Since Wireshark was a small part of my overall job, I didn’t pursue it further.
Now that I’m studying for the Cisco Network Certified Associate (CNCA), a Wireshark certification will be next on my list.
Good plan.
Regards
Paul
Possibly but it might also help fit much of the CCNA stuff into place. Your call.
Regards
Paul
It’s not too hard and it’s very valuable.
Regards
Paul
Thank you, you guyz seems to offer a great servise and if i decide to go for it.. i will definitely use your service
All 5 point make sense and should indeed convince anyone who want to be recognised in this field… so it is necessary to get Wireshark certified.
Please compare the level of difficulty of this CERT compared to the CCNA.