Everyone loves sitting exams right….?! No, but seriously it seems like if you work in IT, certification and exams are like Window updates, always on the horizon, generally a PITA, but sometimes, just sometimes actually worth the time spent preparing for them!

Over the last few years I've worked through a few but my current focus is a little outside my comfort zone..... the wonderful world of networking! Now don't get me wrong I've worked with networks through necessity for a number of years, but I'm certainly not what you'd call a "network guy" *cough, cough* not looking at you @Phil Snowdon.

To be specific I'm talking the Juniper flavour of networking here. Thats right, our vBridge core network is Juniper based and as such it pays to be comfortable with Junos, the platforms network operating system.

I was going to talk about how all of Junipers online training material for certification is completely free and online on something callled Junos Genius..........but, that's recently changed sadly and is no longer available 😞.  This has been replaced with Juipers own shiny new Learning Portal which has some free content but nothing like what was previously available. There's plenty more there if your prepared to spend your hard earned $$.  

Having not done any network certification previously I've started with the Associate level cert JNCIA-Junos and depending on how that goes may continue with the Specialist cert JNCIS-SP (service provider routing & switching).......we shall see!

Now, I'd worked through and compelte all the online modules on the now defunct Junos Genius portal (which were actually really well put togther), and I was ready for the exam. There are two practice test and then you get to sit your "voucher assessment test". If you pass that with a score of 70% or higher you receive a Pearson Vue discount voucher for the actual certification exam.  And that's where things came unstuck!

Juniper in their wisdom shutdown the Junos Genius portal and started migrating all content to their new Learning Portal. My particular account and progress seems to be somewhere between the two and until the new portal shows I've compete the required modules I can't sit the voucher assessment test and then take the acual exam! Bugger .... looks like it could be mid Arpil before the migration is complete 😫.

Oh well, more time to prepare I guess! As a final point, if you are looking at Juniper certification I'd suggest jlabs is a great place to get some "hands on" if you don't have access to your own hardware for lab purposes.