Bringing an Entire Networking Team to CCNA and CCNP Certification On-Site

The Challenge

A global manufacturing company operating 12 production facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia had inherited a fragmented networking team following a series of acquisitions. Of its 41 network engineers, 22 were legacy employees with deep institutional knowledge but no formal vendor certifications, and 19 were engineers acquired through M&A activity with certifications from competing vendors or outdated Cisco tracks. Network outages at two production facilities in the prior year had cost an estimated $1.4M in downtime, and a post-incident review attributed both events partly to inconsistent configuration practices across teams with different knowledge baselines. The VP of Infrastructure set a goal: certify the entire team to a common Cisco standard — CCNA for associate-level engineers, CCNP Enterprise for senior staff — within a single fiscal year.

The Solution

Boost eLearning recommended an on-site delivery model to minimize travel disruption for engineers who could not leave production environments for extended periods. The program was built around three regional training hubs — one in Ohio, one in the Netherlands, and one in Malaysia — with Boost instructors traveling to each location for intensive training weeks:

• On-site CCNA boot camps (5 days each) delivered across all three hubs, accommodating shift coverage through parallel morning and afternoon cohorts
• On-site CCNP Enterprise (ENCOR + ENARSI) preparation for 14 senior engineers, delivered as a 3-day intensive followed by remote live-virtual lab sessions over 8 weeks
• Boost Live Labs provided each engineer with a persistent Cisco lab environment accessible between on-site sessions — engineers could continue practicing topology builds, OSPF configuration, and SD-WAN policy from their facility laptops without physical rack access
• Vendor-aligned practice exams mapped to the current Cisco exam blueprint, with a final readiness gate before each exam booking
• Pass Guarantee applied to all 41 seats across both certification levels

How the Program Was Designed

The needs assessment started on the plant floor, not in a conference room. Our team reviewed the manufacturer’s network alongside its engineering leads: multiple production sites, aging switching infrastructure, and a growing layer of connected industrial equipment that the existing team had learned to manage by experience rather than formal training. The conclusion was a two-tier program: bring all 41 engineers to a common CCNA standard, then advance a senior group of a dozen to CCNP to own design and troubleshooting across sites.

On-site delivery was non-negotiable. Production runs around the clock, and the engineers who keep it running can’t disappear to a training center for a week. Instead, a Certified Partner instructor came to the facility and taught each block twice a day — one session per shift rotation — so the maintenance roster never thinned. Training was structured as intensive week-long blocks spaced several weeks apart, giving engineers time to apply each block on the job before the next began.

Live Labs were physical and immediate: rack-mounted routers and switches set up in a training room on site, configured to mirror the plant’s own topology, including the VLAN segmentation separating office IT from production systems. Between blocks, engineers kept access to remote lab racks so configuration practice never stopped.

Checkpoints were practical by design:

• Hands-on assessments at the end of every block — build it, break it, fix it;
• Timed configuration challenges drawn from scenarios the plant had actually experienced;
• Exam scheduling in waves, so certifications landed without pulling whole shifts offline.

The Pass Guarantee applied to every CCNA and CCNP exam attempt in the program. Engineers who needed a second attempt received refresher sessions and continued lab access at no added cost — which mattered to a finance team that had approved one number, not an open-ended one.

The Results

The program concluded in 16 weeks — within the fiscal year target. Outcomes reported by the manufacturer’s infrastructure team included:

• All 41 engineers were certified: 27 at CCNA level and 14 at CCNP Enterprise level
• First-attempt pass rate: 87% for CCNA, 79% for CCNP (ENCOR component)
• In the 6 months following certification, the company reported zero unplanned network outages attributable to configuration error — a metric that had averaged 2.3 incidents per quarter in the prior year
• Mean time to resolve (MTTR) for network incidents dropped by 34% in the two quarters post-certification, as reported in the company’s internal operations review
• The manufacturer standardized its change-management runbooks based on CCNP-level best practices introduced during training, reducing peer-review cycles on network change tickets from 4 hours to under 90 minutes on average

“We had engineers in three continents with completely different knowledge baselines trying to manage a single global network. Boost didn’t just deliver training — they built us a common language. Twelve months later our incident rate is the lowest it’s been in five years.” — VP of Global Infrastructure, global manufacturing company