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certifications, and 19 were engineers acquired through M&A activity with certifications from competing vendors or outdated Cisco tracks.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

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