Now, Let's say you're planning to take your CCNA for routing and switching. Actually, This is 2020 now so I'm just gonna say your CCNA, Because now there's just one CCNA test, You're planning to take it, The probably one of the first things that you should do. You should go out there and find the blueprint for that exam, Download it print it out and grab all the topics. Once you got the topics, You should go ahead and break that down into subcategories.
Once you do that, You want to take note on what are the things that are weighted more heavily. So, For instance, I know when I used to take my CCNP exams. The BGP section was quite heavy in the OSPF, A section. So for me, I knew I knew that I had to place a lot of my priority on those two sections and I wanted to understand those technologies to the best of my ability. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend a whole lot of time on subjects that aren't going to cover a very large portion of the exam.
Now you might be saying that you've taken certification exams, Where there are certain topics that weren't even on the blueprint and I've certainly experienced that myself and a lot of that kind of attributes to why most people don't pass on the first attempt and it all kind Of goes back to kind of the look of the draw in terms of what type of exam questions that you get. However, If you run into a topic that, For whatever reason, Is not on that blueprint on the first exam - and you don't pass - definitely take note of that and when you go back home and study, Make sure that you vers yourself pretty well on that topic because Chances are that you probably will run into that topic again, So you definitely want to plan your detailed schedule on a weekly basis. So you want to know what days you're going to be studying and what days you're actually going to take a break. So for me, When I was studying for my CCIE exam, I decided to study six days a week when studying for the written portion of the exam, At least so what I did is when I came out of work.
I got out at about 5 o'clock. I pretty much finished eating food like at around 6:30 and I pretty much shut myself in my room from anywhere from 6:30 all the way to midnight Monday through Friday and every week, Depending on where I landed the previous week. I would make sure that I updated that on my calendar and I knew what topics and what sections I was going to cover the next week now I'll admit, I didn't always hit those marks. However, If I was backtrack, I could always go back to take a look and make adjustments, But the point is to actually have a plan and not only have that plan but try to stick to it as best as possible.
You definitely don't want to rush through it if you don't understand a topic, But if you feel like you understand the topic well enough, You can go ahead and move on now. You also want to base that detailed schedule upon the type of study material that you attain, And for this I would recommend pretty much a plethora of books, Especially the cisco certification books official certain guides.
I know there's a lot of other udemy courses that are that are pretty popular as well. Those are the ones that I'm familiar with. I would take advantage of as much as you can in terms of the number of vendors and the number of teachers that you have to learn from you're gonna find that certain teachers will resonate better with you and with your personality and your way of learning.
You also want to make sure that you get your hands on some type of lab workbook. I know there's a lot of really good ones on Amazon, I believe it's 101 labs that I use for my CC and p-switch and route exam. I don't know those books are still out there, But if I will, If I do find them I'll link them in the description, Definitely find yourself good workbooks to base your studies off of. You also want to try to find some online resources that you can use.
These could be either RFC documents or blog posts, Or maybe even the cisco communities webpage. Lastly, In regards to doing scheduling, I would highly recommend that if you live with your spouse or partner, If you live with family, That t understand that when you make this schedule, This is essentially a commitment to yourself. So you want to make sure that t understand that during this time, It's as if you're pretty much, Not there or you're at work somewhere. I know this is a really hard pill for a lot of people to swallow, But this is definitely one of the biggest.
I think indicators of whether or not you're, Actually going to pass these exams is whether or not you're actually able to have this discussion with family members with people that you love and understand that t need to know how much it means to you if t do Give you the time set aside and within the next couple of months, You'll have that exam pass and you'll be able to spend a lot more time with them when the time comes now, I think we're applicable, Especially if you don't have experience with the actual hardware That you're working on, I would highly recommend that you go out and buy a physical lab, Especially if you're just starting up. So if you're working on Microsoft, Search or server certifications, You may want to go out there by yourself a server on eBay. If you're working on Cisco certifications, You might want to buy some routers and switches some ASA's just so that you can get exposure to what that equipment. Actually, It looks like how it actually integrates and boots up from an initial configuration perspective. Now, At some point you might feel pretty comfortable with the equipment and you don't necessarily need it. So you can go on and move on to use things like gns3 or even G or other type of virtualization softwares, So that you can run your larger scale labs.
You definitely want to find a flow that works well for you and what I mean by that is in terms of your content and your study material know exactly how you want to consume that and in the order that you want to consume. So for me I always learn best when I visually learn it. So for me, When I was going through my CCNA, For example, I would like to read the articles from two separate vendors. Let's just say, The topic was around a idrp. I would like to read that an entire series of eigrp from both vendors then go to my official search book and start reading find any other online material.
If I had any questions, I would probably ask on the Cisco communities and then lastly, I would go through and lab about the different topics. Now the labs, I might do, Article per article depending on whether there were sub categories within AARP, Which there definitely are just so that I can keep up with the pace and not you know, Learn one subject at the very beginning, And then you know a couple Of tens, Or maybe even hundred under pages later, Forget all about that first subject, So I would recommend for labs to do them as often as possible and in I guess, Short animals. This tip is definitely going to sound counterintuitive, But I would highly recommend for you to also remember to take breaks, We're all human and we need to like disconnect for a little while. So there are several types of ways to do this for one, If you're studying for a long period of time, I would recommend that every hour or so that you get up and stretch for about five minutes or so for every hour also, I would highly recommend That you set up a number of hours that you want to study. So if you have a goal for 20 hours and if you hit that 28 hours within five days or if you do every other day as long as you're hitting that goal, You shouldn't feel pressured to move much further along.
So, Let's just say you hit your you're 20 hours of study by Friday and you want to take Saturday and Sunday off and you really feel like you need to tie. I would definitely recommend that you take that time to you, Know, Plant back down on the ground, Reconnect with your family and do the things that you need to do to take care of yourself. Remember that burnout is a real thing and you want to make sure that you don't burn yourself out, Because that will completely stop all your progress. Now.
This one is probably the most important, But also the hardest one to really tune. Well. You'Re gonna find there's a lot of very large study groups out there, But often times the larger. The group is the more kind of convoluted it becomes and oftentimes you'll find people dropping out of those city groups. What I really like to do is to create small study groups, No more than maybe five people who are at around the same place where you are, Then you start and you create essentially a cadence and the schedule with them.
So not only are you just in a group and asking people questions on the slack board or or a discord, But you're actually meeting up either in person or you're meeting up over a WebEx or a zoom call so that you can actually hold some kind Of accountability with each other again, This is actually really difficult to do to find those people, But once you find them definitely stick with them. I found a really great group when I was working through my CCIE. It was wonderful and we all became really good friends to this day. It was a group of about five or six of us that started in the group, And I was able to work alongside especially one of those individuals who was able to help me, And I was able to help him.
Do things like create labs for troubleshooting and just spread different types of ideas to each other or ask different questions or maybe fill in the blanks where the other individual just didn't, Understand something well enough. What we found is that that really helped us prepare for some of these more difficult exams. One of the things that I highly would recommend is to teach other people what you learned and with the study group you'll, Be able to do that.
Just imagine, For instance, You studied for about a week, And you have this weekly study session with your your group of maybe three people and you take turns explaining different topics to each other, And what you'll find is that, As you are pressured to teach people how To do something or how to understand a certain topic, You will actually begin learning it at a much deeper level.
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