CCIE, CCNA and CCNP Salaries and demand

It's fair to say that many companies have felt the pinch in this last world wide recession. Certainly Information Technology (IT) in all it's forms has not been excluded from this, jobs have been outsourced, or shared amongst other team members as another is let go, or cheaper workers have taken their place. As a personal comment, I went from a very well paying job in the city to a job in the suburbs paying half of what I was on after being made redundant, thankfully I have bounced back, but times were tough, and i know of many others in a similar situation.

Most information technology salaries have, over the last few years, dropped considerably, when compared to the pre-recession era. So how has the number of CCIE jobs, the Cisco salary scale, and especially the CCIE salary scale faired?

CCIE Salary compared to CCNA and CCNP

Looking at the data listed on itjobswatch.co.uk we can see that in 2011 the average CCIE salary offered was in the region of £57,500, in 2012 this dropped to £57,000 and has risen back to the 2011 figure in 2013, so thankfully the last couple of years have been kind to the CCIE certified!  

Over the last 9 years the CCIE salary scale has actually changed very little, which is good news for anyone trying to justify the cost of the CCIE exams vs the potential salary increase.

CCIE Salary scale

Now if we compare this against the CCNA and CCNP job salary scales, again we see very little change over the same period:

CCNA Salary scale

CCNP Salary scale

We can see that there has been very little movement within the CCNA and CCNP job salaries on offer, in fact the CCNA is showing a very steady climb.

Number of CCIE, CCNA and CCNP roles

Although the CCIE salary has stayed around the same, the number of roles available has fluctuated dramatically:

Number of CCIE roles as a percentage of total roles

Granted, we are only talking about a couple of percentage of overall IT jobs, but there is still a considerable change. Now let's look at the CCNA and CCNP for comparison.

CCNA roles as percentage of total

CCNP roles as percentage of total

So over all we can see that the recession as it was in the period 2009 to 2011 is now slowly recovering and demand is, once again, climbing back to pre-recession levels.

Summary

The number of roles requiring any form of Cisco certification has risen and fallen in-line with the recession. The salaries for the CCNA, CCNP and CCIE have only changed by a few percent over the years and are, in general, on the rise again, which is good news for all Cisco certified people!

We can see that the average CCNA salary is around £37,000, this rises to around £46-47,000 with the CCNP qualification and then to £57,000 with the CCIE certification. So this does show that all the study, hard work and dedication will pay off! 

Author : Unknown

CCIE #49337, author of CCNA and Beyond, BGP for Cisco Networks, MPLS for Cisco Networks, VPNs and NAT for Cisco Networks.

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