Cisco Systems also sponsors a line of IT Professional certifications for Cisco products. There are five levels of certification: Entry, Associate, Professional, Expert, and recently Architect, as well as eight different paths, Routing & Switching, Design, Network Security, Service Provider, the newly introduced Service Provider Operations, Storage Networking, Voice, and Wireless.

Cisco also provides training for these certifications via a portal called the Cisco Networking Academy. Qualifying schools can become members of the Cisco Networking Academy and then provide CCNA level or other level courses. Cisco Academy Instructors must be CCNA certified to be a CCAI certified instructor.