The training for the CCENT puts you halfway towards CCNA Routing & Switching then as I found once you get the CCNA its not much more to get the CCDA, then once you get the CCNP its not much more for the CCDP.
I had the CCNA, CCDA, CCNP, CCDP & CCIP with a whole pile of sales specialist certs to help keep our Gold Certification and was considering my CCIE in Routing & Switching but as I had moved into pre-sales it was getting harder and harder to get the hands on time to keep my skills current and when it came to re-cert time I let them lapse. The CCIP (Which has now gone) I really enjoyed doing as it was Advanced Routing, BGP, QoS and MPLS.
When I was studying for them the lads in our hot staging area let me have a whole pile of routers and switches so I could build up my own labs, but with beefier PC’s and router simulators its easier to setup a virtual lab now, well if you can get hold of the IOS versions you need.
My big tip get plenty of time at the command line, you need to get a lot of commands almost into muscle memory so you can rattle them off quickly in the exams.
