I Took Cisco's CCST Networking Exam - Here's My Review (2024)

in January of 2023 Cisco announced the CCST Networking certification, where CCST stands for Cisco Certified Support Technician. Personally, I believe this is a great first certification for someone getting into Cisco technologies or into any area of the IT field. Also, it's a great review of fundamentals for those that have been in the IT space for a while.

If you examine Cisco's certification lineup, the CCST Networking certification is considered to be an entry-level certification. This suggests that CCST Networking is an easier pathway to your first Cisco certification as compared to most other Cisco certifications, such as the CCNA certification.

Unlike most other Cisco certifications, CCST Networking never expires, and you don't need any prior experience or training. You can start at the ground level and build from where you are.

Recently, I took the CCST Networking certification exam because I was developing a CCST Networking course, and I thought you might enjoy a review of that exam.

Throughout this review, I'm going to be very careful not to break any non-disclosure agreements. The information I'm sharing is either my opinion or information that Cisco or the testing provider has made publicly available.Specifically in this review, I’ll comment on this exam in a variety of categories. Let's dive in:

• Registration: The registration process was smooth. However, you cannot use the same Pearson VUE account used for previous Cisco exams. Instead, a new account has to be setup athttps://certiport.pearsonvue.com
• Cost: The cost is less than most other Cisco exams ($125 at the time of this writing).
• Difficulty: Although, difficulty is relative and will vary among certification candidates, personally, I found this to be the easiest Cisco exam I’ve ever taken.
• Duration: The duration is only 50 minutes, so it’s not nearly as exhausting as some other exams.
• Number of Questions: The number of questions you have on your CCST Networking exam will be in the range of 35 – 50 questions. This suggests (considering the 50-minute duration), that you won’t be faced with any extremely time-consuming questions.
• Accuracy of Exam Blueprint: The accuracy of the exam blueprint is excellent. In fact, I don’t recall seeing any question that did not fit into one of the topics on the exam blueprint.
• Accuracy of Questions: I would rate the accuracy of the questions as “good,” rather than “excellent.” In fact, this is a reason I didn’t score better on the exam myself (my score was about 930). When taking most Cisco exams, you want to be on the lookout for clever wording in the questions, where you might be tempted to select an incorrect answer. So, when I read an exam question, I’m always looking for exceptions rather than the “obvious answer.” This exam, however, was different. I way overthought the questions and found a few reasons why the “correct” answer according to the exam was not really correct. For this exam, I should have just gone for the “obvious answers” and not overthought the questions.
• Time to Get Official Results: Not only did I receive my preliminary results as soon as I completed the exam, I received an e-mail with my official results within about one hour of taking the exam.

So overall, I'm a big fan of the CCST Networking exam, and I think it's great for those just getting into the industry and for seasoned professionals to go back and revisit the fundamentals.

Hopefully, this exam will help many more IT professionals enter the world of Cisco certifications. To help with that, recently completed my CCST Networking – Video Training Series. This self-paced training series contains 118 videos. Also, I kept the content concise and tight, so the runtime comes in at a little over nine and a half hours. This course gives you 14 quizzes, which can be taken using an online graded exam engine that gives you a score. Also, you can download each of the 14 quizzes as PDFs, which contain detailed explanations as to why the correct answer is correct.

If you’d like to check out my brand new course, there are two options:

You can purchase the course for less than $20 on Udemy by clicking HERE.

Or you can access the course, along with 25 other courses in our library, by joining our All-Access Pass, which costs just $29 per month. You can get more information about that by clicking HERE.

Whatever your decision, I’d love to hear what you think of this new CCST Networking certification.

Take good care,

Kevin Wallace, CCIEx2 #7945 Lifetime Emeritus (Enterprise Infrastructure and Collaboration)