The route Cisco itself lays out, taught live on physical racks. One shared foundation - CCNA, then the professional core - and then four roads: enterprise, data center, service provider, automation. Each stage assumes the last, so nothing is repeated and nothing is skipped.
one road, four branches
at a working pace
full progression
The road
Every stage is taught live by a working engineer - and every stage assumes only the one before it.
1The Foundation
Network Engineer · NOC Engineer
How packets actually move - and the IOS muscle memory to make them move the way you want, drilled on real racks.
Why this stage
“Every journey here starts with the same first config. Build the muscle memory everything else assumes.”
2The Ascent
Senior Network Engineer
Where the enterprise begins: overlays, redundancy, wireless and automation in ENCOR, then the advanced routing, VPN services and troubleshooting discipline of ENARSI on top.
Why this stage
“The core and the concentration together - the full CCNP Enterprise certification, and the qualifying exam for CCIE.”
The road forks - pick a route
The campus and the WAN, from a controller
The Overlay
WAN Engineer
Bring up the overlay with vManage, write control and data policy, steer app traffic.
The Controller
Campus Network Engineer
Provision a campus from one console: sites, SD-Access fabric, images and assurance.
The Summit
Network Architect
Eight hours in the lab, designing and repairing a network under time pressure.
Destination
Network Architect
Fabrics, ACI and the AI cluster
The Fabric
Data Center Engineer
The data center core: NX-OS, VPC, overlays, Fibre Channel and UCS compute.
The Policy Fabric
ACI Engineer
Build an ACI fabric from discovery up: tenants, EPGs, contracts, VMM.
The Deep Fabric
Senior ACI Engineer
Forwarding internals, multi-pod and multi-site designs, and service insertion.
The AI Cluster
AI Infrastructure Engineer
The network under an AI cluster: lossless RoCEv2 with PFC and ECN.
The Summit
Data Center Architect
Design, deploy and repair a complete data center against the clock.
Destination
Data Center Architect
Carrier-scale transport, orchestrated
The Core
Service Provider Engineer
IOS XR, BGP at scale, segment routing transport, L2VPN and L3VPN services.
The Orchestrator
Orchestration Engineer
NSO from the ground up: YANG, the CDB, NEDs, and your first service package.
The Service Model
Senior NSO Developer
Service packages in Python: mapping logic, callbacks and validation.
The Platform
NSO Platform Engineer
Run NSO as a platform: upgrades, high availability, backup and CI/CD.
The Summit
Service Provider Architect
Build and repair a provider backbone under exam conditions, against the clock.
Destination
Service Provider Architect
Make the network configure itself
The Pipeline
Network Automation Engineer
Software development on top of the network: REST APIs, NETCONF and YANG, CI/CD.
Destination
Network Automation Engineer
All four roads start from the same CCNA and the same professional core, so you do not have to choose on day one - you choose once you have seen which kind of network you enjoy. Plenty of our students come back for a second road later; the automation route in particular pairs with any of the other three.
The road is mapped and the first batch is live. Take the first step - or talk to us and find out which stage you're already standing on.
Your roadmap
18–30 monthsCCNA
The Foundation · 3–4 months
ENCOR + ENARSI
The Ascent · 5–6 months
Then one of four routes
Enterprise Networking
3 stages · Network Architect
Data Center Networking
5 stages · Data Center Architect
Service Provider Networking
5 stages · Service Provider Architect
Automation
1 stage · Network Automation Engineer