Learning Cisco From The Ground Up

[Johnny3937]

I have been in Telecom for several years and would consider myself proficient in both Nortel and Avaya switches....but things seem to be going the way of Cisco and 10 years from now I don't want to be useless because all I know are these older switch languages.
I wouldn't mind doing some contracting to learn the Cisco product line, but it seems everybody wants to hire contractors who already know everything. It's a catch 22 which I went through back when I started out on Avaya/Nortel.
Any recommendations? Aren't there some basic Move Add Change jobs out there that I could get in on to get my feet wet with Cisco without having to be an expert from day one?
Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[daleblizz]

In the bigger cities you can break in on "conversion" jobs. (For example: switching from Nortel to Cisco.) Unfortunately even these jobs seem to "want" some Cisco experience or training.

Which is where things get weird. Most want you have a CCNA (at least). But when you are just breaking into Cisco phone programming they don't let you touch the Command Line Interface (CLI) stuff anyway. Cisco MAC work is done through a web-based GUI interface. So training to get your CCNA, which is almost all CLI really doesn't get you anything practical or useful for Cisco phone MACs (just a certificate).

The useful classes for Cisco phone MAC work are the administration classes, which seem less likely to get you a job than the CCNA classes (since there's no certificate), but these are the classes that actually prepare you for Cisco phone MAC work.

So it's a judgment call. If you want to actually learn something about Cisco phone MACs take the administration classes.

http://www.globalknowledge.com/trai...ourseid=12643&catid=206&country=United+States

http://www.globalknowledge.com/trai...ourseid=12645&catid=206&country=United+States

If you want to have a credential that may get you hired, so you can learn on the job, go after the CCNA training.

Or buy the books, do the cheat sheets, or find someone who has taken the class, who wants to share his information.

I installed Nortel PBXs for years before our company started converting to Cisco. The good news is the Cisco is a lot more labor intensive, so it's hard to get rid of techs. I can use the copy command and program a dozen Nortel phones in about five minutes. Using the copy option in Cisco still means it takes around fifteen minutes to program each phone. (At our company, we have to program five "devices" for each phone on the Cisco system. And we copy the users name -- as one example -- into five places into each of those five devices.) And this is using the copy option. Building them from scratch takes a lot longer. Time is saved because the user can move their own phone, but when an employee is replaced -- changing the name, disassociating and associating the users etc. -- on the phone and it's other devices -- is not a simple job.

I realize that things will get quicker with experience, but it's hard for me to understand a lot of the repetitious programming that has to be done on each Cisco device, especially when you're using the copy option.

It's not really that hard, it's just tedious. And with all the times you have to enter the same information (the user's name 25 times), it's easy create mistakes.

Good luck.

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

Like you I too came from 25 years in the TDM world (Mitel) but also learned Mitel's VOIP product (the 3300 and 200-ICP) - little of which proved to be of any help in migrating my skillset to Cisco.

Cisco PBX programming is arguably the most illogical and granular of any system I've ever been exposed to. Very little of the standard PBX nomenclature you've learned is used by Cisco, making it awfully hard to search the documtation for what you've come to understand as legacy terminology. Even Cisco's documentation (to me at least) seems terribly fragmented, often referring you to other documents and in general leading you over the river and through the woods and around the mulberry bush a time of two to find the answer. Overall the best (most complete) documentation I've found is in the HELP screens in the GUI programming interface which is also available online for downloading.

With patience and perseverence you'll eventually get there. I started out with the Global Knowledge ACUCW1 course which was analogous to 2 lbs of coffee in a 1-lb can, but they didn't show us the BATch tool or any of the BATch templates, which once learned can be a huge timesaver. If I had it to do over I'd skip ACUCW1 and ACUCW2 and go straight to the CIPT-1 and CIPT-2 courses.

Most of the system admin training in the ACUCW(x) courses is duplicated in the more advanced CIPT-1 and CIPT-2 courses, except now it's 3 lbs of coffee in the same 1-lb can, as the courses are tremendously compressed and get into more of the technical things. Do not try to attend either course while remaining "on-call" at your regular job. The interruptions will be devastating to the condensed learning process. I'm sure I would have gotten a lot more out of them had they each been 2-week courses instead of 1. Still and all, none of these courses do much more than "touch" on Unity & Unity Connection Voice Mail, so that's another 1-week course and yet you still haven't learned anything about Cisco's Contact Center (yes, more courses). We're also still not into call routing, which is covered in yet another course. Without Cisco Learning Credits (usually awarded with a system purchase) you can easily spend $10 grand just to get an introduction to the Call Manager, Voice Mail and Gateway routing. Without someone on-site to mentor you, you'll still have a pretty good-sized learning curve ahead of you.

One of the important things to consider is that you didn't acquire all of your Nortel & Avaya expertise overnight or in a single class or in a couple weeks or in a couple months. It all comes with time.


Original MUG/NAMU Charter Member