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Last week I had the great opportunity of joining the CMNA training in Copenhagen, in what I would say was a hands-on conference. The certification process was quite straight forward and didn't require any advanced networking skills. However, coming from traditional Cisco certifications, I was surprised by the certification technique chosen by Meraki. While most certification exams focus on testing your knowledge and skills in specific topics, Meraki pushed us through a learning process. We had to go through all the Meraki product portfolio in the presentations section, as well as the implementation of technologies like QoS, SD-WAN, Wireless, Layer 7 firewall, motion detection etc. in the lab section.
Whenever you join conferences or trainings, it's important to understand what you take with you at the end of the day. My thoughts about Meraki and the hands-on conference are:
- Simplicity is the key in all Meraki solutions. You can take a bunch of sales, tech nerds and students in a room and make them deploy a multi-branch environment good enough for most companies in DK.
- What's simple, doesn't have to be limited. Meraki has always embeded technologies only after introducing the highest level of abstraction, as close to the human nature as possible. Despite our mixed technical skills, or lack of them, we were all able to implement a broad range of technologies, which would require days to understand and implement in the old traditional Cisco enviroment.
- A conference doesn't have to be boring and a training/certification doesn't have to be complicated. If the best of both worlds is mixed: well-prepared presentation sessions and simplified lab experiences, the process itself will provide the best experience for the participants, and the most productive results for the presenting company.
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