Cisco Certified Design Associate (CCDA)
Cisco's CCDA (Cisco Certified Design Associate) is an introductory to mid-level certification for IT professionals who can "design routed and switched network infrastructures involving LAN, WAN, and dial access services for businesses and organizations." The CCDA has as its prerequisite the "knowledge and skills to install, configure, and operate basic network infrastructures." As well, Cisco highly recommends holding the CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate).
The CCDA is a prerequisite to the CCDP (Cisco Certified Design Professional) certification and got its start several years ago. It's been most recently changed in the fall of 2002, with the release of the new DESGN exam. A candidate needs to pass this one exam to achieve CCDA certification. The CCDA is valid for three years. "To recertify, pass the current certification exam or any new exam at the Professional or Cisco Qualified Specialist level bearing the prefix 642."
Job roles of those pursuing this certification generally include: network administrator, network infrastructure administrator, infrastructure engineer and network designer.
A CCDA certified individual can perform the following tasks:
- Determine a customer's requirements for network performance, security, capacity, and scalability
- Design a network structure that meets these requirements
- Articulate the benefits of the design to a customer's satisfaction
- Develop and test a prototype network that validates the design and demonstrate that proof to a customer's satisfaction
Benefits of CCDA Certification
Overall, Cisco certification validates an individual's achievement, so it increases the holder's professional credibility by ensuring high standards of technical expertise. In particular, the CCDA certification indicates knowledge of network design for the small office, home-office (SOHO) market and for medium-size organizations whose simple LAN, routed WAN, and switched LAN networks have fewer than 500 nodes.