As an avid admirer of Oracle University and folks working on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) certifications, it’s my absolute pleasure to announce the OCI 2025 Networking Professional certification.

I have been working with OCI almost from day one and was thrilled to take part in the original OCI Networking Professional beta exam during CloudWorld 2023 in Las Vegas. I was one of the very first test takers! The exam was the hardest I’ve taken from OCI, but it left me in a good mood because it was something I felt OCI was missing back then. Why was it missing, might you ask.

The Importance of Cloud Networking

I can’t stress enough how critical networking skills when working in the cloud are. They help you with designing and implementing cloud solutions and troubleshooting issues. Whether you’re a long-term networking professional, cloud architect, or database administrator deploying your databases in OCI, learning OCI networking skills is a must! You want to ensure that your solutions are provisioned securely and perform as expected with a network setup that makes sense.

OCI Networking has rapidly introduced features, while maintaining a clear and straightforward approach to managing and configuring the network, making it very easy to learn! I usually rely on the OCI documentation as my primary source of information, but I also watch the online OCI learning videos available for free through Oracle University, which provide valuable insights from the people who design and build OCI.

What’s New in 2025

The new exam follows the same multiple choice question format as before. This version has introduced several new areas that reflect topics that are required for networking professional. Between releases, Oracle University has released lessons on IP address insights, the Oracle-Google Cloud (GCP) Interconnect, and network load balancer enhancements and added the following lessons and exam topics for the 2025 release:

  • Zero trust packet routing (ZPR)
  • IPSec support over FastConnect (over 40 minutes of content!)
  • Domain name system security extension (DNSSec) overview
  • Tunnel inspection with OCI Network Firewall
  • Object Storage private endpoints

Most of the original content is still valid because the exam is kept up to date with latest features and enhancements. You must study and get hands-on experience with the new features to get proficient with them. The exam consists of 50 multiple choice questions, and the passing score is 68%.

OCI 2025 Networking Professional Certification exam details

How Should I Study?

We recommend always watching the online OCI learning videos, diving deeper through OCI documentation, and doing hands-on experiments and testing. Working through the Oracle Cloud Console, the OCI CLI, and even infrastructure as code (IAC), like Terraform, are critical for this exam, so you can learn the functionality inside out when provisioning these services. The OCI learning path also includes demos that you can follow and do hands-on labs. You can also deploy and test many of the OCI networking features with a free OCI account.

A practice exam is available to validate your knowledge and help you become familiar with the exam format, giving you a good sense of the types of questions. It has the same number of questions, and they’re similar in complexity to the actual test, which is helpful. Thorough preparation for this exam greatly enhances your cloud expertise within OCI because nothing compares to having extensive hands-on experience.

OCI 2025 Networking Professional Certification Learning Path

Simo’s Tips

For a few specific areas to focus on, I start from basic concepts with virtual cloud networks (VCNs), subnets, route tables, security lists, network security groups (NSGs), and how they all relate. Learn dynamic routing gateways (v2!), how you attach VCNs, FastConnect, and IPSec VPN to a DRG, and how you route traffic between everything. What needs to be in place for traffic to flow from A to B?

As multicloud is taking leaps with OCI, learn how you connect clouds together! Don’t forget all the new features and functionality that have been introduced since the 2024 exam. Finally, remember always network security!

Should I Take the Exam?

Absolutely! The exam is targeted towards OCI professionals, so have a good background with OCI networking and ensure that you have hands-on experience working with OCI.

Personally, I would take some of the other OCI certifications first, such as the OCI Architect (Associate and Professional) or OCI Security Professional. These exams include various network topics and give a good pathway of successfully getting certified with the OCI 2025 Networking Professional exam.

Taking the exam has been made easy with Oracle University’s own system. With Oracle’s system, scheduling and taking the certification is simple and straightforward. The people who know OCI networking inside out create the questions, so you also get to answer to questions that are typical for real-world OCI networking.

Want to Know More?

Check out the learning paths and take the certification exam yourself! For more information, see the following resources:

OCI 2025 Networking Professional Certification Badge