A junior engineer on my team asked me this exact question last spring. He’d been on the job about eighteen months, was getting bored running ticket queues, and had read somewhere that Cisco no longer required CCNA before sitting for CCNP. He wanted to skip the entry-level cert, save the exam fee, and go straight to the professional track. Was that a real option, or was the internet lying to him?
The internet wasn’t lying. He could absolutely register for CCNP tomorrow if he wanted to. Cisco removed the formal prerequisite back in February 2020 when they restructured the entire certification program.
He just shouldn’t.
That’s the version of this answer that doesn’t fit in a single search result, so let me walk through it the way I walked through it with him.
The Short Answer Everyone Wants
Yes, you can skip CCNA and go directly to CCNP. There is no formal prerequisite. You register for the exam, pay the fee, sit down at Pearson VUE, and take it. Cisco’s official recommendation is “three to five years of experience implementing enterprise networking solutions” before attempting CCNP, but recommendation is not requirement. Nobody at Cisco is checking your resume.
That’s the short answer. If that’s all you came here for, the rest of this article is going to challenge what you do with that information.
Why People Even Ask This Question
The question almost always comes from one of three places.
The first is someone trying to save money. CCNA costs $300. ENCOR (the core CCNP exam) costs $400. Plus a concentration exam at $300. So the math in their head says “skip the $300 CCNA and just take the two CCNP exams for $700 instead of $1000 total.”
The second is someone trying to save time. They figure if they’re going to end up at CCNP anyway, why bother sitting for the test below it? Why study the same material twice?
The third is ego. They’ve been in IT for a few years. They feel like the CCNA is beneath them. They want the better cert on their resume without admitting they should probably earn it the normal way.
I understand all three motivations. I’ve felt versions of all three at different points in my own career. None of them are good reasons to skip CCNA, and I’ll explain why one at a time.
The Money Math Doesn’t Work
The “save $300 on the CCNA exam fee” logic only works if you pass CCNP on the first try. Most people who skip CCNA do not.
ENCOR is a different exam from CCNA in ways that don’t always come through in the marketing materials. It assumes you already know everything CCNA covers, then goes another two levels deeper on top of that. You’re expected to be comfortable with OSPF multi-area design, BGP path selection, MPLS concepts, advanced security, automation with Python and REST APIs, and SD-WAN architectures. The questions don’t warm you up with subnetting basics first.
If you walk into ENCOR cold without a strong CCNA-level foundation, you don’t fail by ten points. You fail by hundreds. That’s another $400 to retake it. Now your “savings” are gone and you’ve also burned three months of study time you’ll need to repeat.
The people I’ve seen actually save money on this path are people who already had CCNA-equivalent knowledge from working as a network engineer for years. They weren’t skipping the foundations. They were just skipping the exam because they’d already learned the material on the job. That’s a totally different situation than someone studying for their first Cisco cert.
What CCNA Actually Builds That CCNP Skips
CCNA is criticized for being a wide and shallow exam. Lots of topics, none of them covered in deep detail. That criticism is fair. But the wide-and-shallow design is exactly what makes it valuable as your first Cisco exam.
CCNA forces you to learn the entire vocabulary of networking under exam pressure. Routing, switching, security, wireless, services, automation. By the time you pass, you have working familiarity with how all of these pieces fit together. You may not be deep on any one area, but you can hold a conversation about any of them.
CCNP assumes you already have that map in your head. ENCOR doesn’t pause to explain what a VLAN is or how OSPF forms adjacencies. It assumes you know, and asks you to troubleshoot a scenario where adjacencies aren’t forming the way they should.
People who skip CCNA tend to have what I’d call a Swiss-cheese knowledge base. They know the topics they happened to study deeply. They have gaping holes around topics that didn’t show up in their CCNP study material because CCNP assumed they already knew them. Those holes become real problems on the job, not just on exams.
If you want a high-level rundown of what each cert is built to teach, the existing CCNA vs CCNP breakdown on this site covers it. The condensed version: CCNA gives you the map, CCNP gives you depth in specific regions of that map.
The Few People Who Can Actually Pull It Off
There is a small population of people who can legitimately skip CCNA and pass CCNP. Let me describe them honestly because some of you reading this might be in that group.
Working network engineers with three to five years of hands-on experience can usually skip CCNA without consequence. You’ve been configuring routers and switches every week. You’ve troubleshot real outages. You know what a broadcast storm looks like because you’ve watched one happen. The CCNA exam at that point is reviewing material you genuinely know.
Engineers coming from another vendor’s ecosystem can sometimes skip CCNA. If you’ve been doing Juniper or Aruba work professionally, you understand the underlying concepts. You’re really only learning Cisco’s specific implementation and command syntax. CCNP-level material is hard, but you’re not starting from zero.
People with strong CS or networking degrees who’ve done extensive hands-on lab work sometimes pull it off. Not the average grad. People who graduated and then spent six months in a home lab grinding out OSPF redistribution scenarios.
That’s roughly the full list. If you don’t fit one of those three profiles, you’re probably going to struggle.
The Resume Question Nobody Talks About
There’s something you won’t see in the official Cisco materials. Hiring managers know what a normal cert progression looks like, and a CCNP without a CCNA also visible on the resume reads as slightly odd.
It’s not disqualifying. Nobody’s going to throw your resume in the trash. But when I’m interviewing someone whose resume shows CCNP and nothing below it, I ask different questions. I want to understand how they got there. If they walk me through years of professional experience, that conversation goes fine. If they admit they jumped straight in to skip a step, I get more cautious about whether their fundamentals are solid.
CCNA followed by CCNP reads as someone who built up the right way. CCNP alone reads as someone I need to verify a little harder. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s just pattern recognition from looking at hundreds of resumes.
I’d add that the cost of including CCNA on your resume is approximately zero. You’re not paying for the line of text. You’re paying for the exam, which you needed to take anyway to confirm you actually know the foundation material.
The Middle Path That Actually Works
There is a version of “skipping CCNA” that I do recommend. It looks like this.
Study all the CCNA material thoroughly. Lab everything. Pass every free practice test you can find with 90% or better. Build a home lab and break things on purpose until troubleshooting becomes muscle memory. Get to the point where you’d absolutely pass CCNA if you sat for it tomorrow.
Then sit for it.
That’s the middle path. Don’t actually skip the cert. Just skip the part where you let it slow you down. If you’re ready for it, schedule the exam, knock it out in one attempt, and move on to CCNP study within two weeks of passing. You can be done with both within a year.
The “save the exam fee” version of skipping isn’t worth $300. The “save time” version isn’t worth the holes you’ll have to patch later. But the “move quickly through both” version is real and it works.
How To Know If You’re Ready For Either
A few diagnostic questions I ask the junior people who come to me with this question.
Can you subnet a /22 network into four equal subnets in your head, in under sixty seconds? If you can’t, you don’t have CCNA-level knowledge yet, let alone CCNP. The mental math approach to subnetting on this site is where I send people who can’t.
Can you explain the difference between OSPF DR election and OSPF priority configuration without looking it up? CCNP expects you to troubleshoot why DR election isn’t going the way you want, which means you need to be past the level of “what is a DR.”
Can you draw a network with two locations, three VLANs, inter-VLAN routing, and a default route, and then write out the configuration for both routers from memory? Not the exact syntax. Close enough to actually work.
If those questions feel impossible, you are not ready to skip CCNA. You may not be ready to pass CCNA. Either way, the path forward is more lab time, not a more expensive exam.
If those questions feel easy and slightly insulting, you might be in the small population that can skip CCNA without consequence. Even then, I’d encourage you to take the exam anyway.
The Honest Verdict
Cisco didn’t remove the CCNA prerequisite because they thought people should skip it. They removed it because the old system was administratively rigid in ways that didn’t match how engineers actually progressed through their careers. Some people get to CCNP-level knowledge without sitting for CCNA. The prerequisite was an obstacle for them, not a teaching tool.
For everyone else, and I’m talking about most people reading this article, the CCNA serves the exact purpose it always served. It forces you to learn the full breadth of networking before you start going deep on any one area. That breadth is the foundation that holds up everything you do later in your career, including but not limited to your CCNP.
If you’re looking for the path that gets you furthest fastest, take the CCNA, pass it, then go directly to CCNP. Don’t skip either one. That route is shorter than people think and the holes are much easier to spot when you’ve been forced to walk through them already.
If you want a wider view of what’s available after CCNA (concentration tracks, specialty paths, the road to CCIE), the Cisco certifications beyond CCNA guide on this site lays out the full landscape.
My junior engineer ended up taking CCNA last summer. Passed it on the first attempt with a comfortable margin. He’s six weeks into his CCNP study now and tells me the CCNA foundation is paying off in ways he didn’t expect. He no longer thinks about whether he should have skipped it.
Most of the people who skip CCNA come back and say the same thing eventually, but they say it after they’ve already burned a few hundred dollars and a few months of study time learning it the hard way. You don’t have to be one of them.
Senior Network Engineer | CCNP Enterprise | CCIE Candidate
Trave Hurd is a senior network engineer with over a decade of experience designing and managing enterprise Cisco environments. Holding multiple Cisco and industry certifications, he writes about the full arc of a networking career, from passing your first exam to building the skills that get you to the top of the field.
