Training, Certification & Career

Hello Everyone.

I have taken the ClearPass Essentials class and attained the ACCP cert. I am going to be taking the Advanced Labs class soon.

When I looked at the ACCX (ClearPass Advanced) certification, I noticed that it is not a typical cert exam but an 8-hour practical and requires one to be able to configure specific Aruba as well as Cisco controllers, along with Active Directory.

Here's the last piece of the puzzle: My background is analytics and database - spent many years with IBM as a pre-sales engineer selling DB2 and associated products. I also have a couple of years pre-sales experience with Cybersecurity products in the endpoint management space. But I have little or no communications/networking background.

Do I understand the fundamentals behind an ip address, a DNS, a router, a switch, a controller? Sure. Do I have experience configuring them? No.

I'd like to throw this out to anyone who's been through this and would like to offer their opinion. I'm sure eventually I can learn what I need to learn. But am I getting the wrong impression that getting to the point that one can pass the ACCX exam and/or be able to be productive as part of an implementation or to lead an implementation (as part of a business partner or the like) ... would take quite a bit more practical experience than what I have? How much experience/time? Is this role a pragmatic choice for someone with my background?

Many thanks for your help!   

ACCX is a practical exam, and most information about it is available here.

This page includes a Candidate Profile:

"Typical candidates for this certification are networking IT professionals with a minimum of three to five years experience in designing and integrating complex enterprise-level mobile first networks. Successful candidates have familiarity with integrating ClearPass Policy manager, Guest, Onboarding, Onguard, Profiling and Posture in multi-server ClearPass deployments."

From my personal experience, without solid hands-on experience, it will be very hard to pass the exam.  During this 8 hour exam, you will be required to demonstrate your skills by making the correct design choices and then actually implement it on the equipment that is available to reach a working environment.

So unless you implemented ClearPass in a few deployments, it will be a challenge to pass this test.