A Wild DevNet Certification Appeared!

I took and passed 200-901 DEVASC. Let’s talk about it.

This is part one of this story. I am setting the table of my experience with career certifications and will briefly touch on what I think of the DEVASC exam. In part two, I will detail how I approached preparing for the exam.

My certification journey so far

I remember passing the CCNA exam and feeling relieved, proud, and accomplished. After half an hour of celebrating something occurred to me. While I had learned a body of knowledge and passed an exam, I hadn’t actually created anything. By learning the CCNA body of knowledge, I had only expanded the ways in which I could create valuable outcomes for my employer. It was only the first step.

I don’t think this was a particularly heady realization but while I was studying for the exam I developed tunnel vision. I somehow felt once I passed there would be a litter carried by the networking devout to convey me to my throne as king of Cisco IOS and sovereign of subnetting and routing protocols.

The feeling after passing was lackluster. I went on to get other certifications and had a similar feeling each time. It just didn’t get me out of bed in the morning. I was ambivalent about the time spent preparing for exams. There were certainly good things to learn along the way but exam blueprints are fixed and not always relevant to current work. I stopped thinking about certifications for years and focused on delivering good work instead.

New DevNet certfications

Since my first month at Cisco, I’ve been interested in DevNet. I worked on a few DevNet Express events, developed my own understanding of the technologies and methods, and advised customers on how to get the most of Cisco products using APIs and automation. When it was announced DevNet was going to release certifications, I was excited and apprehensive.

What would a DevNet exam even look like? Would you have to write code? Parse data? Would there be silly trivia on product specific APIs?

My experience with the DevNet Associate certification

I am happy to say the exam is a good one. The exam didn’t have much minutiae or trivia. For the most part, I think the questions were well written and at an appropriate level. The level of questions ranged from simple knowledge checks to application of tools and/or technique. The DevNet team has put together a decent blueprint covering the basics of software development in the context of Cisco DevNet. In contrast to how I usually feel about certification exams, this was an exam I enjoyed preparing for and taking.

I think learning the body of knowledge of the DevNet Associate exam was worth the time. If you’re on the fence about whether or not you should dedicate the time, spend a week studying and see how you feel. If you’re excited when it’s study time, then you’re on the right track!

In the next part, I’m going to detail how I approached the exam. Thank you for reading!