Last year I let my Juniper certifications expire. This was partly due to a combination of burn-out, lack of interest in spending money to re-certify while I was unemployed (through choice, see burn-out) and not knowing where to look for quick and structured study materials. My previous efforts in studying had been primarily book based and I was lacking in the will to drag them out again — so I let them slip.
Re-energised this year, however, I wanted to try re-cert from the ground up – taking my time and seeing what the state of online learning was in 2025. I started again with the old original, the first cert I ever got – the JNCIA (or JNCIA-Junos as it’s called now).
Juniper (or HPE-Juniper.. yuck) now offer a pretty good self-paced online study course for the JNCIA – for free. Search for Open Learning - Junos, Associate (JNCIA-Junos) and see if you can find it. It’s an online delivered video course that covers all the topics in the JNCIA-Junos exam. I found it great as a veteran of Junos, it wasn’t patronising nor excruciating like I feared it would be. I didn’t learn much (but I wasn’t expecting to) but the refresher was great and I passed the exam no trouble with 97% score (you have to get one wrong for good luck).
The course material is really well written and presented, probably the best I’ve ever seen from Juniper on an online delivered course. There are some labs they make mention of during the course of the lessons, however they are not available “on demand” or in the Juniper vLabs cloud directly, so I just ran them locally on eve-ng if I felt like I needed to – which was once.
The content of the exam overall was about right – although I do have quite a bit of experience to back it all up with. Nothing too crazy like AI or too much focus on Automation right off the bat, which I think is good to not scare people away and remain a “pure” networking certification. I recommended the course to a couple of people and was hoping to step through the content with them, to see what it was like from the other side of the experience bell curve, but that hasn’t worked out just yet. Who knew asking people to do homework in their spare time would prove unpopular?
If you have a desire to grab the JNCIA-Junos cert, I can’t think of a better way to go about learning the required material.
Now I’m off to CBT-Nuggets for a go at Knox’s JNCIS-SP course. The road to JNCIE-SP is finally unblocked.