Tracking

CWNP tracking: Tracking your CWNP certification progress.

It's important that you prepare properly and pass the exams, but it's almost equally as important that you login to the CWNP Tracking System and make sure your personal information is accurate and up to date.

https://www.cwnp.com/tracking/login.php

We recently reminded everyone that CWNP recertification is about to take effect, three years after the initiation of our recert policy. Lots and lots of people's email and snailmail addresses were not up to date. Don't worry, we're into tracking too, and we found them all.

Please login using your CWNP ID number and your password and update your personal information! If the email you had before was a company email, and you left that company 14 months ago and don't have access to that email, contact us to reset your password. You are not alone. Just let us know. Send us a quick email - with your current, non-company email, and give us your CWNP ID number (hint: it's on your certificate) and ask us to reset your email and password. We'll do it, no problem.

Questions of the day

OK, so maybe of the week...or month...sometimes. Devin Akin, our CTO and wireless LAN expert, has been posting his "Question of the week" on the CWNP Forums for about 2 months now, to tremendous response, mostly of brain-pain.

Devin pushes himself to learn and know more than anyone out there, and his questions prove that out. How much do you know? Check out the forums and read up on the questions.

CWNP ID Cards

They're here. Now, when you earn any CWNP certification, you CAN REQUEST a "Certification Kit", which has a nice letter from me, your beautiful certificate (suitable for framing!) and a wallet sized personalized colorized beautified signified ID card.

Notice I said you can "request" this kit. CWNP no longer mails certificates to "the address provided to us by the testing center". Most of the time this address is not accurate. Now you'll login to the CWNP Tracking System, verify your info - including your address - and request your certification kit.

Everyone will actually receive their certificates now.

New CWNA WLAN Administration Course

We've just fully introduced the new wireless LAN administration course to our Learning Partner network. This is version 3.0 of this course, and it is a complete overhaul from the previous version, which was nearing 3 years old. CWNAILTv3 makes for a full 5-day, 40 hour class, with about 8 hours of customizable labs.

The lecture portion, driven by the usual PowerPoint presentation, is anything but "usual". The lecture features more than 200 flash animations of complex wireless LAN concepts, helping the student to SEE what's going on over the wired and wireless portions of the network. If a picture tells a thousand words, then an animation tells a million.

This new courseware covers all the CWNAv3 exam objectives plus about 40% on top of that for good measure. It's about way more than the exam. From AAA to PoE, students of the new CWNA WLAN Admin class are going to get a thorough education in the foundations of running an enterprise wireless LAN.

We've had 3 train-the-trainer (TTT) classes so far, and the reactions are consistently "wow!" from our instructors.

White Papers Galore!

A while back, we created our own home grown version of a searchable database of wireless white papers. It plays host to a whole lot of white papers from a whole lot of industries. We call it the CWNP Learning Center, LC for short.

LC has grown from literally nothing, to indexing well over 1000 white papers, all of them focusing strictly on WLAN and related technologies.

Lots of folks new to wireless ask us, "where do I start?" LC is a great place to find some short and some long white papers that will give you the inside skinny on what's happening in the WLAN space.

CWNT - Our version of Quality of Service

Shortly after we introduced the CWNA certification came the CWNT certification. CWNT stands for Certified Wireless Network Trainer.

We've set the bar pretty high for CWNTs. To be a CWNT, you have to (1) attend the latest official class, (2) score above 80% on the latest exam, (3) hold another IT industry teaching cert like MCT, CCSI, CNI, etc., and (4) have at least 1 year of documented IT training experience.

"Latest" above appears twice. Why? Good question. Just like software, certifications are always being upgraded and updated, especially in the wireless space, because the technologies are changing so fast. Every time we update an official class, CWNTs have to attend a Train-the-
Trainer (TTT) class to re-up their knowledge of what's in the class and how to best deliver the materials to their students.

Every time we upgrade an exam - like we just did with CWSP (PW0-200) - each CWNT must take the new exam, and again score 80% or higher within a certain time period to maintain his/her CWNT status.

And all that's just to qualify. Why is it so tough? CWNP instructors are one of two means of quality control that we have for the delivery of CWNP classes. The other means is the quality of the material delivered.

CWNTs participate heavily in the creation and maintenance of all CWNP materials, especially the courseware, since that is their primary focus of involvement in CWNP. As you can imagine, our instructors are nitpicky, and we like it that way. They regularly beat us up over small points that are important to them and to their students in a classroom environment.

Teachers are held to a higher standard, and we have no issue with that at all.

Wireless# Study Guide

No, the McGraw-Hill Official Wireless# Study Guide is not yet available. Soon, I promise. But, there is a great, very inexpensive, downloadable study guide available at PrepLogic.com.

This 110 page PDF was written by a couple of CWNP Triple Crowners (they have all CWNP certifications) who really know their stuff. They put it all down on paper, and it does cover all the Wireless# exam objectives very well.

While it's not "official", we certainly recommend this study guide for those of you wanting to break into the wireless world. Challenge yourself, and learn what's going on out there in Wi-Fi, WiMAX, Zigbee, Voice over WiFi, Bluetooth, and RFID.

"Entry Level"

Entry Level is a loaded phrase! Many folks refer to CWNA as entry-level. It's just not so, sorry to say. We've developed and positioned CWNA to be on the same level as Cisco's CCNA and Microsoft's MCSA - administrator level.

Anyone who has achieved, say, CompTIA's Network+ and A+, and then heads for CWNA thinking it's entry level is in for a big surprise. CWNA is tough. It covers a very wide spectrum of topics, all of which are part of the foundations of WLAN technologies.

Wireless#, our newest certification, IS entry level, and is meant to be so. Wireless# is about introducing the candidate to the various popular wireless technologies that are currently in the home and also the enterprise. It's about what those technologies are and what they do, rather than how they work and how to install, secure, and troubleshoot them.

Wireless# requires no previous knowledge or experience. CWNA requires a solid background in IP networking. You should get IP networking knowledge through something like Cisco's CCNA or the equivalent experience.

Salaries in Wireless

Big subject...why else do people seek IT training and certification? Why else: to get a better job either where they are or someplace else. Yes, there are other reasons, but they boil down to making oneself more valuable.

The last two years, CWNA and CWSP have ranked pretty well in the annual CertMag.com Salary Survey:

http://www.certmag.com/images/CM1205_Figure1.htm

Hint: lower right hand side, "Planet3 CWNA".

Here's the inside skinny, and many people get the wrong idea from salary surveys like this, even though they are very telling. The thing is that you don't just go get your CWNA and then stand up and demand your $69k annual salary. No, far from it.

What this survey means is that, of the people surveyed, those who hold the CWNA certification are making an average of $69,600 per year. What we don't know at all is what other certifications those folks hold, how long they've been jiggling the cables, where they work, and how valuable they are to their organization.

Still, salaries for people with CWNP certifications and those working in wireless are well above average.

Around the World

CWNP reaches people globally. That's pretty cool. From our inauspicious press conference at 930am on September 11, 2001 (no, it never actually took place, but it was scheduled!) to certified IT professionals in 86 nations! We're not Google, but CWNP has helped make better wireless IT professionals in 86 different countries.

Google Maps needs to work with Microsoft Excel so I can see the footprint.

History of CWNP

There's a lot more to tell, but here's the short version.

Devin Akin and I were working together at a small division of First Data Corp, Devin improving the network and me working on westernunion.com. Our faith was the first thing we had in common, and we quickly realized that we both wanted to own our own business someday.

Devin has an idea. I didn't say it was a good idea. It was an idea, and that was enough. We formed "Devcomm" (gee, where'd that name come from?) in May of 1999 as a wireless LAN reseller and integrator. We created WirelessCentral.Net and Scott Turner joined the gang. In 2000, we saw a big ole hole in the IT certification space: wireless. Sold WirelessCentral.Net for practically nothing, but enough to fund the development and "launch" of the CWNA exam.

Launch. HA! We had a press conference scheduled at Networld+Interop for 930AM on a Tuesday...in September...in 2001. Yes, you guessed it: 9/11/2001. Not a good day, and our world was rocked before 930am on that hideous day.

So we literally started at ground zero. No borrowed cash, no venture capital. Just an idea, but now it’s an actual IT certification exam. That worked. We received some great feedback. In the Spring of 2002, we published our first CWNA Study Guide under the "Dairy Queen Napster" model. After that came the course guide, then the official practice test. CWNP quickly became a real business!

Later that year we started work on CWSP, Wireless LAN Security. WLAN Security was hot, and still is. Is wireless secure? No, but the properly trained IT professional can make it secure. In 2004, we introduced Wireless LAN Analysis, and in 2005, Wireless#.

Stay tuned for what’s next. We quickly adapt the CWNP Program based on the changes in the networking landscape.