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Once inside and seated in my class, Introduction to Cisco Router Configuration (ICRC), the contrasts between Cisco training and my MCSE education continued. First, the audience wasn’t the same. Whereas the MCSE crowd consisted, more often than not, of the typical network administrator, such wasn’t the case for this course. The Cisco class was overwhelmingly populated with people from the telco industry. These individuals, whose technology paradigm commences with wide area networks and extends up to voice networks, were attending to fill a few knowledge gaps about computer networks and the Cisco family of products. But other aspects of the class were similar to an MCSE course: The attendees were overwhelmingly male and slightly overweight at that.

Once lecture started, I noted another point of contrast. The first two days of this five-day offering focused on the Open Standards Interconnection (OSI) model and TCP/IP. While something of a yawner for this tried and true MCSE, it was an eye-opener for the talc crowd, who listened with great interest. We MCSE types found common ground with the talc crowd briefly at mid-week. By day three the lecture delivery consisted of hands-on Cisco router configuration, perhaps the main reason most attended the class. It was here a real sense of community developed; everyone in the room had something to learn.

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More importantly, during the mid-week Cisco configuration exercises another critical contrast between the MCSE and Cisco courses dawned on me. The difference involved hands-on exercises. I can still recall all too well the agony of being a lonely island in Microsoft’s SQL Server 6.5 Administration course, attempting to type queries in ISQL. Ouch! The norm for an official Microsoft MCSE certification course is a 1:1 ratio between student and computer (each student has a computer). Not so with the Cisco certification class. Here, students were paired at each personal computer--the "buddy system" in action.

Call it team building, but I found myself getting to know my fellow classmates much better than I have in my MCSE courses. Also, with a buddy, I found the emphasis to be less on hunt-and-peck typing and more on mastering the content. In the past, as both an MCSE student and later a Microsoft Certified Trainer, I observed that a certain proportion of the student body, left alone at a PC, will spend more time mastering keystrokes and mouse movements than fulfilling course objectives (and, ergo, exam objectives).

Give Cisco an A+ for implementing the buddy system as its basic teaching paradigm. That puts the emphasis on the routers at the back of the room, not the PC in front of you. The only application you actually run on the PC is telnet, further underscoring the emphasis on the routers and not the actual operations of the PC. Also, it certainly keeps the expense down for the training center. Before you cry cheapskate, remember that the money saved by skimping on PCs is more than twice over invested in those expensive Cisco routers you’re configuring.

Come days four and five, the roles reversed. Here the emphasis shifted to talc-friendly topics such as LATAs, Frame Relay, and X.25. Now it was the talc crowd fighting off boredom and the MCSE’ers on the edge of their seats. A few of the MCSE types, myself included, confided late Friday afternoon that it was the day five lecture on the Wide Area Networks (WANs) that emerged as a highlight of the week. Well we didn’t have to even lower our voices to share such confidences; the talc crowd, by and large, failed to return from lunch, leaving us MCSEs to ourselves.

So how did I fare after a week of Cisco training? I discovered that configuring a Cisco router isn’t magic nor especially intimidating. Much like implementing TCP/IP, Cisco router configurations can be accomplished by many of us, given the proper training. And I came away with an important observation that I plan to carry forward during my Cisco certification journey: Who better to teach routing and WAN topics than a talc? Kind of like attending law school in Washington, D.C. or studying operating systems in Redmond, Washington. My suggestion: Keep it close to the source.