CCNA4.Com: Helping you to get Cisco CCNA Certification.

CCNA Certification Exams

For the first time since Cisco announced CCNA in 1998, the CCNA certification has an option for multiple exams. Before Cisco announced these latest changes in 2003, to get your CCNA certification, you passed a single “CCNA exam.” With this latest generation of the CCNA, you can take a single exam to get your CCNA, or you can take two exams—with each of these exams covering a subset of the CCNA exam topics. Table I-1 lists the exams. So you either take the CCNA exam, or you take both the INTRO and the ICND exams, to pass CCNA.

Like most Cisco certification exams, the names of the INTRO and ICND exams come from two Cisco Authorized courses. Cisco’s INTRO course covers a broad range of topics, from Ethernet cabling to virtual private networks (VPNs). The Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices (ICND) course delves more deeply into core Cisco technology and protocols—in particular, switching and routing. The INTRO course covers a broader range of topics in less depth, and the ICND course covers fewer topics in more depth. Like their namesakes, the INTRO and ICND exams cover similar depth and breadth.

The CCNA exam covers everything on both the INTRO and ICND exams. So if you want to save some cash, and you are confident that you are ready to answer questions across the whole range of topics for CCNA, you can take just the CCNA exam. Alternatively, you can focus on the INTRO exam first, master those topics, pass the exam, and then move on to the ICND exam.