Well its been exactly a year since I started the venture of writing about my CCIE journey Its been quite a journey so far with ups and downs.
A few things I have picked up along the way;
- Don’t underestimate the course!! – This is probably the second most important thing. This is a marathon, not a sprint. If you want to achieve this in a few weeks then the course isn’t for you. Getting into the depth of the broad set of technologies you need to learn takes a long time depending on your level. Given the level of commitment you need with this course, you need to seriously ask yourself why you want to do it and if the benefits are going to outweigh the costs (not just monetary costs). Make sure you set yourself a treat to work towards at the end of the course. It may not be enough to just have that all important number at the end to give you the motivation you need, you may want to set something like a really nice holiday if you pass.
- Make sure you give yourself downtime – You need to have downtime otherwise you will burn out. I found myself a few times “burning the candle at both ends” for 2 weeks straight, had a lack of sleep and then got ill, and because of that had to take a week off studying. This impacted my studying more because I ended up forgetting things in that time I had off so had to go over them again. That being said don’t take too long off otherwise you may find it difficult to get back into it, as I did. I took off a few weeks studying a few times and found it really hard to get the motivation back to carry on. At one point I think I took a few months off!!
- Give yourself targets – Setting yourself targets, either weekly or monthly. Setting targets also sets expectations for you and your family, and helps with motivation. Make sure they are realistic targets. For example, if you have never touched BGP before, you are not going to learn all the ins and outs in a week. Setting a target like this will only demotivate you and be counter productive. Different people learn at different rates. Find what works for you.
- Imperative that you have the support of your family!!! – In my opinion this is the most important thing!! I don’t think I would be where I am now if it wasn’t for the support and encouragement of my wife. She has been very understanding and patient with me while I have been on this course. Things like doing the shopping at the weekend alone, going to certain family engagements without me, loosing me in the evenings while I study and she is alone watching TV, we are also trying to buy a house at the moment and she has taken on a lot of the responsibility of organising things (anyone that has been through this process knows how stressful and time consuming it can be). You need to find a healthy balance of spending time with your family and studying otherwise it will take its toll. You don’t want on the day you get your number to also be served your divorce papers!
- Expect to miss lots of things – social events, birthdays, TV shows, movies. I think this is a given but they will be there when you finish, and the course isn’t going to be forever. Its only a short spell in your life. You can catchup on everything once you have passed the finish line. What I have taken to doing is watching a single TV show each day while I eat my dinner. That way I get a bit of down time each evening. At the weekends maybe watch a film around lunchtime or dinner time, then straight back to studying.
- Avoid distractions – I myself, find its all to easy to be distracted and have a habit of procrastinating. You need to find the best way for yourself to stop this. I generally plug my headphones in and listen to music. Cutting off the Internet didn’t work for me as I found myself needing to look at the Cisco documentation and RFCs a lot.
- Information retention – Find the best way to remember the information your learning. When I started I didn’t write anything down and because of this all the topics I originally learned, I forgot, so am now going to have to do again this time writing it down. It was one of the main reasons of starting this website, so I could write down all what I had learned and refer back to it if I need to quickly skim over a particular function of a technology. Lots of diagrams explaining the technology also helped me so I can actually visualise it.
I find myself putting in between 20-30 hours a week study some weeks, and others when I find I need to back off a bit between 10-20 hours a week. I also try to take off 2 nights a week to spend with my family.
I have covered about 90% of all the topics I need to learn, so thought it was about time I booked my written exam. My exam is on Friday 8th May – just under 2 weeks time. I have started doing practice exams to try and get in the mindset – as well as identify any last minute topics I need to brush up on. Writing my own exams helps as I am able to write questions and put responses that are very similar but not quite accurate, just as Cisco would do in the real exam. Hopefully these will prove useful to people in the future as well – You can find them under the Quiz section on the website.
Fingers crossed for the 8th!