Hi There,

You should start with the CCNA

Mikrotik is a tool that you use in the trade

A small analogy. I you have a farm and you want to learn how to farm, you pick a jembe and start digging

Since you are learning the ropes of digging you will need to learn abit on how to hold the jembe, rate of digging, when and where to dig etc.

This part you are acquiring your education and you do not put pressure on yourself for a bumper harvest, since you are still training.

Then you exercise until you are competent enough and then you have your style of digging and preferences as well

So CCNA and MTCNA.

CCNA gives you a good grounding on NW terms, technologies, what goes where and general theme of how Networks run

Then after some time of using the kit you realise that many clients are after reliable excellent service and not really what is offering the service.

To be blunt, if it was offered via witchcraft and you didnt make them aware it, they wouldnt care. As long as service is excellent, that is all they care.

Here is where other NW products come in. Mikrotik for feature rich kernels without any pricing models etc. Juniper as well for being a price cheaper that Ciscos

Now Ciscos have a bigger economic ecosystem to maintain that is why its a ""better" product. In the real world though with SMEs where value is more important than brand marquee. They just need basic infrastructure, with realiability. The SME market space is quite broad in these parts of the world, Africa

So The cheaper the service can be acquired the better. The Ciscos on the hand play well in the Big enterprise market because you need a bigger support engineer base coz of scale involved.

Ciscos again have better hardware form factors for lengthy uptime

This being constant, the Mikrotik also supports lengthy if properly configured

I have run some for 400 days with results pasted somewhere online <search>

At the end of it, is acquiring the education then once out here in real world, you can use the knowledge to pick your jembe.

The COMPENSATION of your knowledge should be as a result of how you use it, not acquiring it. Remember there are too many CCNAs out here and to be sifted as a better of the breed, you have to have SKILL not just paper! That will put cassava on the plate.

Kit we use: Mikrotik, Juniper, Checkpoint, Untangle, Linux homebrews, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun, HP etc.
Daily experience: design, log to this and that CLI, configure, harden and hand over.
Small CV: We run About 100 geographically spaced network nodes with users up to 5000 in the SME market somewhere in Sub sahara