I am about to clear my ENCOR 350-401 and I’m stuck at the crossroads for my concentration exam. Between 300-410 ENARSI and 300-415 ENSDWI, which one is more in demand for enterprise roles right now? I see a lot of jobs asking for SD-WAN, but traditional troubleshooting and advanced routing seem like evergreen skills. Is one significantly harder to pass than the other in terms of the current exam lab difficulty?
3 answers
If you want to be a pure "Network Engineer" who can fix anything that breaks, go with ENARSI. It is essentially the old CCNP TSHOOT and ROUTE combined into one. It covers BGP, MPLS, and complex OSPF scenarios in extreme detail. I took it in 2023 and the labs were quite intense. However, if your company is moving to the cloud and replacing MPLS with Viptela, then ENSDWI is the smarter choice. SD-WAN is the trend, but ENARSI is the foundation that makes you an expert troubleshooter across any vendor.
Robert, are you currently working in an environment that actually uses Cisco SD-WAN (Viptela)? It's very hard to study for ENSDWI without hands-on access to a controller or a decent lab environment like CML, as the GUI-based questions can be quite tricky if you haven't seen the interface.
ENARSI is generally considered the "standard" second half of the CCNP. It proves you can handle advanced Layer 3 services and security, which every enterprise needs regardless of their SD-WAN status.
Linda makes a solid point. Most senior-level job descriptions still list BGP and MPLS as core requirements. Having ENARSI on your resume definitely checks those high-level infrastructure boxes.
Michael is right on the money. I tried studying for ENSDWI using just videos and it was a nightmare. You really need to understand the control plane and data plane separation (vSmart, vBond, vManage). I ended up switching to ENARSI because the routing logic felt more intuitive since I work in the CLI every day.