Cisco Changed the Blueprints Again. What Moved in 2026
Cisco pushed a substantial blueprint refresh across CCNP, CCIE, DevNet and CyberOps in April 2026, and followed it with further announcements at Cisco Live. If you are mid-way through a Cisco path, your exam version may have moved underneath you.
What changed
The updates cluster around three themes: AI-driven networking, SD-WAN, and zero-trust architecture. Those are not cosmetic additions. Cisco has folded AI operations content into professional and expert level exams rather than isolating it in a specialty.
Reporting also points to a new DevNet AI specialist track with an associated exam, 300-920 DNAAIOPS, which went to beta in mid-2026. Treat the exact timing as provisional and check Cisco's certification portal, but the direction is clear.
What to do if you have an exam booked
Cisco's own advice on version changes is the right advice: verify your booked exam version against the current blueprint before you sit. Blueprint updates do not always shift the exam code, which means you can be scheduled for an exam whose content has changed while the code you booked stayed the same.
That is the trap. A code match is not a version match.
CCNA and the entry point
Cisco announced a refreshed CCNA at Cisco Live 2026 alongside AI content in the CCIE lab. We covered the detail in our CCNA and CCIE timeline post.
For anyone starting out, CCNA 200-301 remains the entry point and remains worth doing. Networking fundamentals do not churn the way tooling does.
The professional tier
CCNP Enterprise saw blueprint changes, and separately Cisco split wireless out into its own exam, which we wrote about in our ENCOR and WLCOR breakdown.
If you are working toward CCNP, the sets to know are ENCOR 350-401 as the core, then a concentration exam such as ENARSI 300-410 or SCOR 350-701 on the security side.
Is Cisco certification still worth it?
Reported figures put demand for certified network engineers up around 11% year on year in early 2026, with Cisco credentials among the most requested by enterprises. Take vendor-adjacent statistics with appropriate scepticism, but the underlying point holds: networking has not been automated away, and the AI infrastructure buildout is generating more network work rather than less.
The honest caveat is that Cisco certifications are expensive and expire every three years. They pay off if you work in a Cisco environment and are maintenance overhead if you do not.
Our Cisco question sets track current blueprints with lifetime updates, so a mid-cycle refresh does not leave you studying retired content.