Pakistani CCIEs inside story (Uncovered)
Editorial : Eman
CCIE is the most respected and advanced certification in IT industry as claimed by Cisco and this is true as earning CCIE certification is not an easy task. CCIE is not only a certification but it is part of Cisco long term strategy to win the market and remain a market leader. Now CCIE has become standard for networking experts besides any vendor they are working for. Cisco is successful in its plan and it is also come out to be beneficial for a number of technical personals in the world.
For Pakistan it was true before 2006. There were only 5 CCIEs in Pakistan in the start of 2007 and the demand was pretty high. To be a CCIE was a pride and CCIEs were known to be unchallenged technically.
Before 2007 Pakistani networking market was in boom due to the huge investment in Telco and banking sectors in Pakistan. Due to the huge demand of highly technical personals, Cisco changed its strategy in the beginning of 2007 and the result was more than 90 CCIEs passed in one and a half year time and some of them were those who don’t have pre CCIE networking experience/exposure and some were even fresh graduates. Total number of CCIEs in Pakistan is not big as compared to other countries though it is more than required in the market. The major attraction was salary difference between a simple network engineer and a CCIE which is also not that much in other countries. It was almost 6 times in the beginning and some students start investing in CCIE not to learn networking but to change their luck.
At that time due to huge business in Pakistan most of the vendors were interested to start their businesses in Pakistan and they need at least 4 CCIEs to become a gold partner which means huge monthly expenses, the existing vendors were also not mature enough to deal with CCIEs and they think to hire CCIEs will increase the volume of business many times and can provide the solution for any technology but unfortunately it was not a CCIE who can bring the business directly, they are only high techs’ who can provide technical assistance specially the fresh CCIEs. CCIE certification have different flavors like R&S, Security and Voice etc, but in Pakistan vendors expect that any CCIE should be perfect in every technical field including pre/post sales and presentation and that was also due to the fact that they cannot afford separate CCIE for every technology.
Pakistani IT market was used to be an emerging market from 2001 to 2007, but the situation changed due to the instability in politics and law enforcement issues in Pakistan and also in Middle East due to the recession where most of the Pakistani and Indian CCIEs used to work and were in demand for long time. After 2007 the Pakistani economy started slowing down and hence progress in IT sector also slowed down due many reasons including energy crisis which increases the overall energy bill of IT industry, government priorities and foreign investment which decrease deplorably due to the safety issues in Pakistan., but this situation did not slow down the passing rate of CCIEs in Pakistan.
The situation gone worst when Pakistani government declare Pakistan a war zone, the conditionals especially in some parts of country were not good enough to do business. Some of the enterprises limit their presence and freeze further investment; few of them prefer to leave the country. The projects in the government sector were also frozen due to government huge expenses and priority in maintaining law & enforcement and peace in the country. Networking is a customer driven business and to maintain huge expenses and retain CCIEs; vendors need business which was reduce to an alarming level. End of 2009 was the worst year for Pakistani IT market as many vendors started laying off their technical staff and many of them even started closing their operations in Pakistan. As CCIEs are highly paid techs as compare to non CCIEs; they also become victim of the laying off process. Besides the hardworking and versatile nature now many CCIEs specially the one who don’t have pre CCIE networking, presales, presentation experience and are fresh graduates start working in support departments of non IT organizations with salaries many times less then market salary of CCIEs. It does not mean that they are not capable enough but there are very few opportunities for technical only CCIEs in Pakistan.
It is also worth to add Juniper's part. Juniper also played its role as many organizations cannot afford costly networking equipment. Juniper took an aggressive approach and started offering huge discounts on there already low priced products as compare to Cisco targeting non IT companies, medium enterprises and SOHO.
Apart from Telcos and large enterprises, medium size enterprises and SOHO in Pakistan which are not related directly to IT business count IT expense as an overhead and don’t intent to invest in technical staff which also add problem.
The good news is that Cisco is also aware of the worsen situation and has changed its strategy, the passing rate of CCIEs is slowing down all over the world but I think some more steps should be taken to avoid the situation in the future and to regain the integrity and respect of the most acknowledged certification of IT industry. If the strategy work positively the nightmare on CCIEs in Pakistan will soon end.