Cisco launched their DevNet certification track at the beginning of this year and I have been poking around in the details because honestly it is not what I expected from Cisco.
When most people think Cisco certifications they think CCNA, CCNP, CCIE. Routing. Switching. Network engineering. That is the Cisco legacy and it is a strong one. What the DevNet track represents is Cisco acknowledging that the people who interact with their infrastructure increasingly do so through APIs, automation tools, and programmatic interfaces rather than command line configuration alone. The DevNet certifications are designed to validate those skills.
The DevNet Associate exam covers things like software development and design, understanding and using APIs, Cisco platforms and development, application deployment and security, and infrastructure and automation. It is genuinely a blend of networking knowledge and software development skills in a way that reflects how modern network engineers actually operate in environments where everything is headed toward infrastructure as code.
The DevNet Professional goes deeper and the DevNet Expert is the top of the track, but the Associate is where most people are going to start and it is an accessible entry point if you have networking background and some exposure to Python or similar scripting languages.
What I find genuinely interesting about this is that it represents Cisco chasing a real skills evolution in their customer base rather than just creating another set of product knowledge exams. Network automation is not a niche interest anymore. It is becoming a baseline expectation in larger environments. The Cisco DevNet certification information is worth reading through if you are in networking and have been thinking about where to take your skills next.
I do not know yet how hiring managers are going to value these relative to the traditional Cisco certs, but the fact that the underlying skills are in demand independent of the certification gives me confidence that this is worth paying attention to.
Cody Davis is the Program Director for the certification courses on this site, where he oversees curriculum design and the overall learning experience. He holds several IT certifications and brings a practitioner's mindset to everything he builds. When he's not helping IT pros level up their careers, he's wrangling three kids and adding to a GI Joe collection that his family pretends not to notice.