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I’d say useless at this stage in the game. Cloud certs. Get all of them. Kubernetes too.
Cisco certs were the hottest thing around 2002 era. You could go from high school diploma to $150k job with a CCIE (in 2002 money). Admittedly, a CCIE is very super difficult and requires several years of experience and about two years of hard study.
Frankly, if you speak with successful people in IT doing hard technical work (as opposed to softer managerial work) Cisco hasn't been doing well for years. They are still the big gorilla on the hill, but that's because it's difficult and expensive to replace network infrastructure. Even people inside Cisco know this. They are trying to turn the ship, but they make so much money on service contracts and refreshing existing infrastructure that is difficult to kill off and disrupt your own business.
They are trying to change that with Meraki. Meraki is very popular among some industries that want to run a very lean IT department. They have been working on making Meraki SDN friendly. But they are way behind the curve.
Look at greenfield projects over the last decade and into the future. Nearly everyone is selecting a different technology. That's a bad sign. Cisco is too expensive for medium sized companies (which they claim is their best revenue market) and not modern or high performance enough for larger implementations. Cisco is no longer the best technology in ANY area or product line. Everything Cisco does someone else does better.
And large companies with big existing Cisco footprints keep talking about refreshing only what they have to and eventually someday moving on.
All that to say :
If you currently are a Cisco expert and have a Cisco related job, then I'm sure you are doing well. But I wouldn't try to get into the Cisco tech job market now. It's not a growing market. If you have the intelligence and drive to learn something that complex, then you are better off learning something else.
Cisco also just got bounced out of Gartner’s MQ for firewalls. They continuously acquire and grow different businesses but Cisco itself isn’t what it used to be.
Networking has change dramatically due to the cloud. A lot of abstractions on top of abstractions. We see a lot of different SD-WAN players and security companies like PANW and ZScaler with cloud based security services. A lot of the heavy lifting around networking has been taken away. Now it’s all about the application and making sure it can scale optimally in a cloud native architecture.