Enhance Your Career Potential in 2020 with Top 5 Networking Certifications!
Networking certifications appeared prominently in 2020 career rankings because organizations needed professionals who could keep business systems connected, observable and secure. The five entries in this historical roundup covered different kinds of work: packet analysis with Wireshark, network monitoring with SolarWinds, Cisco enterprise design and troubleshooting, broad routing and switching competence, and vendor-neutral networking foundations. Their value was never interchangeable, and holding a badge was not a guarantee of hiring or a particular salary.
For someone reading this older list now, the most useful distinction is between an individual’s demonstrated skill and the status of the particular exam or training program. Cisco’s current exams can be checked against its official catalog. Tool-vendor credentials and historical specialist programs need their own availability checks; an old list should not be treated as a registration directory.
1. Wireshark analysis and the historical WCNA credential
Wireshark is a packet-inspection tool used to observe protocols, timing and troubleshooting evidence. A certification historically associated with Wireshark, the WCNA, represented a focus on protocol analysis rather than overall network architecture. Someone preparing for such work should be comfortable capturing traffic legally, identifying DNS lookups and TCP handshakes, examining retransmissions, and distinguishing a network delay from an application delay.
The practical skill can be demonstrated without claiming that a particular old examination remains available. Take a packet trace in a controlled lab and explain the sequence of events, filtering choices and what the trace cannot reveal. Captures may contain personal data or authentication material, so permission and secure handling are part of professional competence.
2. SolarWinds Certified Professional and operational monitoring
The SolarWinds Certified Professional was a monitoring-oriented credential associated with the vendor’s network-management tools. Its subject was different from packet analysis: operators need to configure discovery, alert thresholds, dependencies, dashboards and escalation workflows. A monitoring system can create noise if every short-lived event triggers the same urgent notification.
An illustrative task is to monitor a branch connection and decide when an alert indicates real user impact. Polling intervals, interface counters, topology and application response time can help identify whether an incident is local, upstream or due to a device misconfiguration. Before pursuing a vendor credential, verify the current product-specific learning pathway and exam terms directly with that vendor.
3. Cisco CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure and Enterprise Wireless
The expert-level Cisco CCIE Enterprise certification family reflects deep enterprise networking responsibilities. Designing campus and wide-area services requires understanding routing control planes, redundancy, segmentation, authentication, policy, monitoring and failure recovery. Wireless enterprise designs add radio-frequency planning, mobility, controller architecture and client behavior. These are specialized responsibilities, not merely an advanced version of memorizing commands.
It is important not to confuse enterprise work with the Cisco CCIE Service Provider track, which addresses different network scale, routing policy and service-delivery problems. Both can be rigorous, but a candidate should choose the technology environment in which they can obtain serious hands-on experience.
4. Cisco CCNA and CCNP: broad foundations followed by specialization
The Cisco CCNA path develops foundations in IP addressing, switching, routing, services, security and basic automation. Cisco’s current 200-301 assessment remains the associate examination. A good candidate can explain why a host cannot reach a remote subnet, follow a packet through a VLAN and default gateway, and use device outputs to distinguish configuration mistakes from physical faults.
Professional-level certifications such as CCNP Enterprise go beyond that baseline. Cisco currently specifies a core exam and one concentration examination, so a learner should not assume the 2020 program design or legacy specialization labels are unchanged. The wider Cisco certification portfolio is useful as context, but the actual current objectives should drive study.
5. CompTIA Network+: vendor-neutral troubleshooting
CompTIA Network+ addresses common networking concepts without assuming one device manufacturer’s command syntax. The contemporary Network+ N10-009 scope includes connectivity, implementation, operations, security and troubleshooting. It can help candidates explain the relationships between Ethernet, IP, DNS, DHCP, wireless and routing before specializing in particular enterprise products.
A practical exercise is to build a small network, document addresses and VLAN membership, create a fault, then restore service using evidence rather than guesswork. This illustrates the difference between recognizing a protocol definition and diagnosing a real outage. Verify the current CompTIA exam before buying dated practice materials.
Choosing a path without relying on 2020 salary rankings
Choose the work first. For a support role, vendor-neutral fundamentals and systematic troubleshooting may be the most immediate investment. A network-operations role adds monitoring and incident triage. A Cisco enterprise engineer needs device configuration and design trade-offs; an expert specialist needs sustained experience with outages, migrations and difficult failure cases. A packet analyst works at a different diagnostic level and often collaborates with all of them.
Certification can provide a structured learning and assessment target, but employers also assess production judgement, documentation, communication and safety. The durable lesson from this 2020 list is to pair any credential with repeatable practical evidence and to verify its present-day exam status before registering.