Andreas Baekdahl: From intern to CCIE instructor

This is the story of how I discovered the world of networking and certifications, and how my ambitions in this field, along with my passion for learning and teaching, have grown continuously throughout my career.

2004

At the age of 16, I began my education as a "data technician," a Danish program focused on teaching various IT skills to practitioners. This is a 5-year formal education that primarily produces IT system administrators or consulting engineers. The program alternates between semesters in school and internships, often in the IT departments of larger companies.

2005

My first semester of internship was in the production halls of a large B2B IT reseller. My responsibilities included assembling computers, servers and storage systems. We had space to work on around 60 PCs simultaneously, each with its own monitor, keyboard and network connection. Some customers required software installation or configuration when they ordered new systems. This software often necessitated local servers that were customer-specific, which ran in a small server room. To make the production halls flexible, all the network connections were terminated in a Cisco switch, introducing me to Ethernet, VLANs and trunks. I honestly had no idea what was going on in the network!

I was soon transferred to a small department focused on secure data wiping. This process involved loading a bootable disk (CD-ROM or floppy) to erase entire hard drives through multiple write-overs, making them suitable for resale or destruction, depending on the customer's wishes. Each hard drive required a printed certificate to verify that the data wipe had been completed successfully. These certificates were created from a Word template, manually typing in the serial number, date, time and drive size. I was puzzled why this process wasn't automated, so I quickly dove into automation, creating a toolset using PHP, VBA and Windows Batch scripting.

One of my fellow students introduced me to Cisco certifications. He showed me the old pyramid diagram with CCNA at the bottom, CCNP in the middle, and CCIE at the top. I had never heard of this before, but he confidently told me that achieving CCIE-level certification required at least seven years of practical experience and thousands of study hours before attempting the full-day practical lab exam. If you passed, you could basically choose any position in the field. Any networking-related job was open to a CCIE. I’ve always liked to go all the way in whatever discipline I engaged in, and seeing a path to something "ultimate" inspired me.

2006-2007

I was relocated to another office and began working in the company’s internal IT department. I spent a lot of time automating tasks to support the company’s laptops and applications, including automating the installation and maintenance of operating systems and corporate applications. Occasionally, employees would approach me with manual processes they regularly performed, and I enjoyed building web frontends for trivial tasks, behind the scenes using web scraping, interacting with SOAP APIs, and extracting data using SQL. These "one-click" applications saved my coworkers significant time. When I had the opportunity, I read through my first two Cisco Press books: the CCNA study guides, volumes 1 and 2.

With another relocation, my internship evolved into joining the Network Engineering consultancy unit of the same company. Initially, I simply followed along with what the engineers were doing, trying to understand the technology around Layer 2, Layer 3, wireless and firewalls. This exposed me to various customer types, network designs, and products from Cisco and HP ProCurve. In one of my first weeks in the department, my boss (a CCIE) showed me a Wireshark capture (then called "Ethereal"). This blew my mind! All the theory I had learned about the OSI model, headers, PDUs and so on suddenly became visible. This made networking "click" for me, and I realized my learning and career path would be centered around networking.

I intensified my studies and passed the CCNA at the age of 18. 🏅

2008

I learned quickly in the network consultancy group and was soon ready to take on my own tasks and smaller projects. It wasn’t long before I could participate in design discussions, troubleshooting sessions and implementations alongside my colleagues, all while still being an intern. My boss even remarked that I might eventually accumulate more knowledge than the entire rest of the group combined! While I’m too modest to claim that actually turned out to be true, it definitely motivated me to keep learning every day. I bought numerous Cisco Press books and read them cover to cover, turning each assigned task and project into a new opportunity for learning by reading configuration guides, Cisco Validated Designs and command references. I also subscribed to CBT Nuggets for the CCNP track and enjoyed the impactful teaching style of Jeremy Cioara. His combination of whiteboard explanations and meaningful demonstrations resonated with me. My final project in school was to build a small MPLS-based service provider network.

I passed all of my final exams of the "data technician" education with top grades half a year early due to merits. 🏅

2009

After completing my formal education, I continued working in the same network consultancy unit. I immediately signed a contract for further education targeting the CCIE Routing and Switching certification. I enrolled in a range of official Cisco training provided by Global Knowledge, covering OSPF, BGP, QoS, Multicast, Wireless and other networking topics. At the end of the year, I discovered a two-week CCIE bootcamp offered by NetMasterClass with Bruce Caslow in Baltimore, USA. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to consolidate my skills in a condensed training experience with extensive CCIE-level hands-on labs. The training was exceptionally well-prepared, with numerous lab exercises and challenging scenarios. Bruce's mentoring style was incredible; he never directly supplied solutions but instead offered hints and clues to guide me toward solving tasks independently. I also decided I wanted to see what the CCIE exam looked like, so as the second bootcamp week concluded on a Friday, I flew to RTP in North Carolina and took the exam the following Monday. I hoped to pass, but I underestimated the level required and failed spectacularly. The experience was invaluable; being there, feeling the time pressure, and experiencing the exam format were all crucial lessons from my failed attempt.

2010

After a few months of intensive study, I felt ready to retake the lab exam. This time, I had the opportunity to read and understand all the questions, but I was overwhelmed by the workload. I ended up failing again, but I did manage to understand the questions and come up with solutions. However, typing all of the needed commands into the equipment and verifying everything was impossible for me due to my lack of routine and experience. I went back to studying and practicing my speed and consistency for hours each day. At the time, I was in my early 20s, with plenty of energy and no kids, so staying up late and then going to work the next morning was manageable.

I continued my intensive study and finally passed the CCIE Routing & Switching exam in March 2010 at the age of 21. 🏅

When I received the results that evening, I immediately called Bruce from NetMasterClass to share the good news. Without his guidance, I would likely have spent many more months and failed attempts before passing.

2011-2012

My job role shifted as more service provider customers entered our business. With my passion for BGP, QoS and Multicast, I became the go-to engineer for those tasks and projects. I was fortunate to gain hands-on experience with the technologies and expanded into MPLS and IOS-XR. I realized these technologies, combined with my fundamental skills from CCIE R&S, aligned perfectly with the CCIE Service Provider blueprint at the time. I seized the opportunity to book advanced MPLS courses with Fast Lane, rented racks, and took mock labs from INE, finalizing my preparations with a one-week CCIE Service Provider bootcamp on-site at INE in Seattle with Brian McGahan. His confident teaching style made me aware of small features and "nerd knobs" I hadn’t known about before. I particularly appreciated that Brian made plenty of mistakes in his live demonstrations. Some were intentional and some accidental, but in all cases, the troubleshooting process that followed offered valuable lessons. I realized that "learning by failure" is an effective way to remember what to do - and not do - when working with complex technologies.

I scheduled my CCIE Service Provider lab exam for August 2012 and passed it on my first attempt. 🏅

I felt confident walking out of the exam room because I managed to verify everything multiple times. The significant difference between my first CCIE R&S exam in 2009 and my CCIE SP exam in 2012 was that I now understood the skill level and execution speed needed to pass such an exam.

2013

I changed jobs to a company named "Axcess," another Danish Cisco partner that focused more on professional services and project delivery. I thrived there, surrounded by elite Cisco consultants. Working with highly skilled people at Axcess inspired me to pursue further certifications. I had two new expert-level certifications on my "wish list" that aligned with my recent projects: Design and Data Center. I quickly decided to attempt the CCDE written exam first and passed with high marks. A few months later, INE offered a European version of their three-day CCDE bootcamp in London. I flew over and attended in a large conference room that wasn’t ideally shaped. We had around 30-40 students, making it challenging to ask questions due to poor acoustics and limited time to discuss design considerations. On the way home, I started looking for alternatives. Jeremy Filliben's course appeared promising, and he had a one-week bootcamp coming up in Las Vegas the following month. He single-handedly created a comprehensive CCIE-level course, including slide decks, a workbook and engaging design scenarios. I immediately respected his effort and decided to give it a shot. I was not disappointed! The class was small - just six students, including myself and Neil Moore (7xCCIE at the time). This allowed for in-depth discussions and sharing of real-world experiences. The CCDE exam itself was held four times a year with entirely new exam sets each time.

After leaving the bootcamp with confidence, I booked my seat in October 2013 and passed my practical CCDE exam on my first attempt. 🏅

2014

I began working extensively with Cisco data center solutions. The classic layouts of Nexus 7000, 5000 and 2000 were everywhere, and I really appreciated the new features that redefined the control plane, forwarding plane and management plane of Ethernet switches. I had limited hands-on experience with UCS servers and MDS SAN switches, so I booked another onsite CCIE bootcamp, this time Brian McGahan from INE seemed like the best option. We spent two weeks in Chicago working hands-on with all the expensive equipment on the blueprint. The excellent rack rental services that came as part of the bootcamp were invaluable; I would never have been able to assemble a lab environment with Nexus 7000, UCS and SANs on my own. During the bootcamp, I felt confident. For everything Ethernet fabric-related, I could apply my old R&S knowledge along with my newfound experience with FabricPath, OTV, vPCs and FEXes. The object-oriented approach to defining compute resources in UCS felt intuitive, and much like defining and inheriting classes in programming. Booking a seat for the CCIE Data Center lab exam was challenging, so I created a script that continuously polled the CCIE portal for available seats. It rarely found anything, and when it did, it was always far into the future. However, during the second week of the CCIE Data Center bootcamp in Chicago, it suddenly found a seat for the following Sunday! I had never heard of Sunday seats before, but there it was. I booked it immediately and changed my travel plans. Although I couldn't actually change the flight, I had to order new tickets and leave the old ones behind. It was worth the effort! The evening before the exam, I checked the practical information for the CCIE test center in RTP and discovered that the test started at 7 a.m., not 8 a.m. I was grateful I checked this one last time, as it served as a good reminder to double-check all instructions for the exam.

Once again, I felt confident leaving the exam room, and the results came quickly - another "pass", this time for CCIE Data Center 🏅

2015-2016

I thrived at Axcess, learning a lot from working with various customer types and networks of all sizes. I applied the knowledge gained across the three CCIEs and CCDE, never considering pursuing further certifications...

2017

I began to miss the learning environment and decided to pursue becoming a Certified Cisco Systems Instructor. With support from my employer, I completed the necessary preparations and signed up for the two-day examination.

My instructor license was approved and I passed the exam for the CCSI certification with 99 points out of 100🏅

(The 1 single point was deducted, because I claimed in the examination that a byte always is 8 bits, which it apparently isn't...)

Soon after, I delivered my first official CCNP course on routing to an internal audience at my company. At this time, my colleagues and I also started contemplating our future work options, as our current company had been acquired by a tech giant, leading to a significant decline in focus on Cisco professional services.

2018

A group of former colleagues reached out to me about joining a new company, and I followed them as soon as possible, joining Wingmen Solutions in April 2018. Back then, it was a small startup composed of highly skilled and experienced engineers, salespeople and executives. We quickly became a Cisco Gold Partner, achieving this in the shortest timeframe ever recorded by Cisco worldwide. I continued to use my instructor certification actively by delivering official Cisco training as a freelancer for Global Knowledge, focusing mainly on ACI, CCNA, CCNA Service Provider, and CCNP. I had to deliver at least 4 courses a year to maintain my instructor status. So that is what I did, and in that way I kept a good balance between teaching and gaining practical experience. Often, I had to present slide decks of up to 1,000 slides in a week. I frequently skipped large portions of the official slides and replaced them with my own whiteboard explanations based on real industry experience rather than just theory and mock examples from the standard course.

All official Cisco courses ends with a submission of feedback from the students. I always scored 5 out of 5 on all metrics about the instructor. 🏅

2019-2020

Cisco announced the upcoming DevNet certification track, which intrigued me as I had been looking for a new certification but hadn’t found anything in the traditional certification tracks that sparked my interest. Cisco Certified DevNet Associate and Professional were set to be released eight months later, with Expert having a mysterious "Future" badge attached to the diagram in the announcement. Interesting!

After visiting the DevNet zone at Cisco Live Europe in Barcelona in February 2020, I was certain this was the path I wanted to pursue. Cisco made changes to the CCNP-level certification, removing the CCNA prerequisite and allowing candidates to create their own variations of the Professional-level certifications by combining a mandatory "core" exam with various "concentration" exams. This meant that two separate two-hour exams would suffice for the DevNet Professional certification. I decided to go for it and scheduled both exams at my local test center - one in the morning and another in the afternoon.

I passed both DevNet Professional exams on my first attempt on the global launch day of the exams. 🏅

In the week that followed, the entire country went into lockdown due to COVID-19, and all test facilities closed.

2021

In September, the blueprint for DevNet Expert was finally released. I examined the lengthy list of 86 exam topics and realized many overlapped significantly with the technologies I worked with daily. I needed to study Terraform and NSO, but otherwise, I felt I had a strong background for attempting the practical lab exam. I was eagerly waiting for the DevNet Expert lab exam scheduler to open for seats, checking availability every day. I even wrote a script to continuously monitor Cisco's DevNet Expert website for any changes. One morning, it picked up updates indicating the booking system was live. I quickly logged in and booked a seat as the very first candidate on May 4, 2022.

2022

During the first few months of 2022, I had to postpone my studies due to work obligations, but fortunately, I could dedicate significant time in the final sprint toward the exam day. I traveled to Brussels for the exam and was completely overwhelmed by the amount of work in the practical section! I realized I hadn’t thoroughly read the blueprint and software list, which meant I hadn’t practiced with the right Python modules and software components. I ended up spending a lot of the day reading documentation and, unsurprisingly, failed.

I was determined to be among the first to earn this certification, so I quickly scheduled a new attempt for one month later. I practiced extensively, paying close attention to all the details and clues in the blueprint and software list. I felt confident during module 1 of the exam, but as module 2 started, I lost my confidence. The first task involved a feature I hadn’t encountered before, and I spent over two hours in a rabbit hole trying to figure it out. This was a poor execution of my exam strategy, and as a result, I didn’t have time to complete the rest of the exam tasks.

With summer approaching, I scheduled a third attempt for after my break. Honestly, I didn’t prepare much between attempts two and three, but I evaluated my test-taking strategy and aimed to replicate and solve the challenges I faced in my second exam. Three days before my final attempt, the entire European airline industry went on strike! Most flights were canceled, and I had no alternative routes to Brussels. Frustrated by this unexpected problem, I decided I couldn’t rely on flight stability, so I took my car and drove the 11-hour journey from my hometown in Denmark to Brussels! I had a positive experience at the test center and felt confident when I left. I enabled loud notifications for emails from the cisco.com domain and put my phone in the trunk to avoid distractions while starting the long drive back to Denmark. A couple of times, I heard the notifications and pulled off the highway to check my email. Finally, I received the email I had been waiting for: my result was ready in the CCIE portal. With high nerves, I logged in and was thrilled to see that I had passed the exam, earning DevNet Expert number 20220006.

I was the first candidate worldwide to pass the Cisco Certified DevNet Expert lab exam. 🏅

Around the same time, I started to feel bored just delivering pre-structured Cisco courses. The instructors I had in the past were still vivid in my memory, and I noticed a clear lack of a bootcamp for DevNet Expert. So, I decided to take on the challenge.

Jeremy Filliben could single-handedly create a high quality CCDE bootcamp with a small class size, allowing for valuable discussions and sufficient time to assist each student individually.

Brian McGahan delivered outstanding live demonstrations in his bootcamps, and INE provided top-notch rack rentals.

Bruce Caslow taught me a lot by encouraging me to struggle through hints and clues toward the right solutions, and the mock labs from NetMasterClass were cleverly designed.

Jeremy Ciora always made learning entertaining by explaining complex topics in relatable ways with real-world examples.

I wanted to do all of that, but for DevNet Expert.

I put together a plan for creating the entire course structure, selecting topics and features to include in an order that made sense for effective learning. I spent hours each night at my whiteboard, crafting the simplest possible explanations for these topics, and even more time developing demonstration scripts and to-do lists for my lectures. Simultaneously, I built a lab environment for my students. DevNet Expert involves many different software components, so I needed a rock-solid environment where everything just worked. Once that was finished, I created four challenging mock labs resembling the difficulty and structure of what candidates could expect from the real exam. It was quite challenging to develop good examples that didn’t mimic actual questions while ensuring I wasn’t crossing any lines regarding the NDA and exam confidentiality. I knew that good timing could enhance my chances of success, so I found two upcoming weeks in November that same year and announced those as the bootcamp dates on LinkedIn.

People started signing up for my 2-week DevNet Expert Masterclass bootcamp immediately! 🏅

2023-2024

Due to high demand for the DevNet Expert Masterclass, I scheduled multiple bootcamps over the next few years. I also launched a cloud-based rack rental system for anyone to practice their DevNet skills on demand. This complete lab environment, which included all components from the software list, could be initialized with a single click. This revolutionized the learning process for many candidates, as building on-premise lab environments can be time-consuming, expensive and distracting from important studies. And guess what? It all runs on exactly the same automation tools that is part of the blueprint!

At this time, I was also accepted into the Cisco Champions group and connected with many people within Cisco DevNet and Cisco Learning and Certifications. I continued to improve the bootcamp materials with each iteration of the course and was proud to deliver "the best version yet" every time.

I also received many requests for on-demand training, so I began the extremely timeconsuming project of recording all my lessons and post-processing them to ensure the quality was as high as possible and the demonstrations and explanations were as effective as they could be.

Cisco's announcement of an unexpected update to the DevNet Expert blueprint version 1.1 caught me by surprise. It wasn’t scheduled for an update at that time, but a few corrections apparently couldn’t wait for the original release cycle. This meant I had to work late hours for many months to incorporate all the new topics into the bootcamp. I pre-announced the updated bootcamp publicly as soon as I could to ensure all my future students felt confident that their training would remain relevant.

2025

To this day, DevNet is still my biggest professional passion. I work with automation hands-on every day in various projects. My own view on this is that running this training business keeps me on top of things regarding the depth of my automation skillset. Meanwhile, the engineering role at Wingmen Solutions provides real-world industry experience.

Those two aspects are a deadly combo, and I have enjoyed every step of this challenging and rewarding career path. 🏅

That's it!

This was my story of transformation from an intern to CCIE and then multi-CCIE/CCDE, to a Cisco instructor, and ultimately starting my own training business to develop and deliver the highest-rated DevNet Expert course available.