How Hard Is CCNP in 2026? An Honest Difficulty Rating

Ask any network engineer which Cisco credential separates the associates from the professionals, and the answer is almost always CCNP Enterprise. Its core exam — 350-401 ENCOR — has a well-earned reputation as a big jump from CCNA. But "hard" can mean several things: hard to understand, hard to pass, or hard to qualify for. For CCNP it is mostly the first two — deep, hands-on content across a wide scope, tested in a way that punishes memorisation. Here is an honest breakdown.

CCNP difficulty rating: 7.5 / 10

On our scale, the ENCOR 350-401 core lands firmly in "Hard" — well above CCNA and most associate cloud or networking exams, but short of the truly brutal expert-level labs like CCIE. Here is where it sits:

What actually makes CCNP hard

There is also the automation layer to reckon with. Modern ENCOR blueprints devote real weight to programmability — Python basics, JSON/YANG data models, REST APIs, and tools like Ansible — which blindsides career routing-and-switching engineers who have never scripted a device. None of it is research-grade, but the surface area is large, and the exam is happy to test the corner of a topic you skipped.

Who finds CCNP hardest?

CCNP vs other certifications

Difficulty is relative. Here is roughly how CCNP compares to other popular certs on our 10-point scale (estimates — your mileage varies with background):

A quick word on the numbers you will see for the exam itself. ENCOR runs about 90–110 questions in 120 minutes, a genuinely tight clock once lab-style items are in the mix. Cisco does not publish a fixed passing score; results are scaled, and the commonly cited figure is around 825 on a 300–1000 range — treat that as a guideline, not a guarantee. There is also no formal prerequisite: you can sit ENCOR without holding CCNA, though Cisco recommends three to five years of enterprise networking experience, and the exam is written squarely for that level.

The honest verdict

CCNP ENCOR is genuinely hard — but it is beatable with disciplined, hands-on preparation, and it is not an expert-grade exam in the CCIE sense. The engineers who fail usually do so for one of two reasons: they under-estimated the breadth and left SD-WAN, SD-Access, or automation half-studied, or they revised by reading instead of by configuring, and froze on the lab-style questions.

Build labs (even virtual ones), drill the overlay and automation topics you would rather avoid, and grind scenario questions until the config patterns are muscle memory. Do that and 7.5 becomes very passable. Consistent, practical preparation — not raw talent — is what separates a pass from a fail here.

How hard is CCNP: FAQ