All CCIE Candidates Should Know

this is a huge problem that candidates make if you do it you're going to you know continue to fail the exam hello and thank you for coming to check out this video I'm actually doing a video that may have some things on here that you expect to be common sense some of them won't be and then also you know when you're in the exam environment some of the common sense that you know you can apply outside of the exam environment you know it's just a different beast you know you're inside of what some people call the pressure cooker environment now I've been mentoring CCIE candidates ever since I was a senior candidate and people were coming to me you know asking for advice or assistance with navigating certain situations and then I've continued to mentor candidates even after I've passed the exam I'll have some really good links in the description of the video that you can check out and also before I get into the content of the video I want to bring your attention to this new podcast that I'm listening to it's called coffee with your se if you like listening the podcast and if you like talking about technology or listening to experts talking about technology check out this podcast because that's exactly what they're doing they're bringing on experts of the field and letting them talk about their technologies and their products check it out let me know what you think in the comments one more thing before I start the video I like when people tell me where they're tuning in from because it's pretty cool to see the reach of these videos so just let me know where you're tuning in from I've had some folks from Australia some folks from Amman Jordan Germany also folks from Ireland and the UK as well and you know a lot of folks from within the United States so let's go ahead and jump into the video now there's going to be a lot of important notes about the Proctor in this video first off we'll talk about who the Proctor is that they're there to facilitate the exam they're there to make sure that the exam is going properly people are doing things that are in violation of the policies and just making sure that the equipment's working the way it's supposed to work the Proctor is not there to be anybody's friend they're also not there to be anybody's you know enemy they're not there to help you pass the exam they're not there to help you fail the exam either in fact when it comes to grading there's a script that does the grading and then the script marks anything as inaccurate the proctor goes in and checks those particular sections and goes through to make sure that the candidate actually did miss the requirements for the test another note about grading is that it's done not by the Proctor who facility was facilitating your exam it's done by another theater right because when you are done testing you're going home that's the end of the day for the proctor as well you don't really expect them to stick around after work to read your exam so it's going to go on to the next Center who then grades your exam and something to think about when you're scheduling your exam is that grades are going to be delayed if you take the exam closer to the weekend grades are also going to be delayed if there's a holiday in certain regions of the world so be mindful of those different things that can affect how quickly you get your grade back the next point I want to talk about is how to interact with the proctor the E in CCIE is expert so you're a candidate to be an expert you shouldn't be going to the proctor asking questions that start with how or why if you do that then you're already setting yourself up to be wasting time and probably not getting what you're looking for for me whenever I was interacting with the proctor I looked at them as the service provider I knew that if I had to go to them about anything I was gonna bring as much data as I could as to you know show why I need your assistance on this why I can't do it so if there's a problem with the device in the environment that I don't have access to that device maybe I would get packet captures from the device I do have access to and get logs and show hey my device is doing X and it expects Y from your device but your device isn't doing Y so I need you to look into that as the proctor I need you to make sure that the device is working properly now understand that you really need to know what you're talking about and you need to actually be bringing factual data you can't just go and try to manipulate the proctor into doing things because they know the environment they know the types of logs that you're bringing them so they're gonna see through if you're trying to just you know bring up fake to make them do things so make sure that you actually know what you're doing when you go to them to ask for assistance with certain products this next one is a hard lesson that I learned the website when you're going to check your grades for me I was refreshing it like every five minutes I couldn't wait to see my grades when you log in too many times or you were if you refresh the page too many times eventually you'll get a screen that says you've been locked out due to excessive logins and you'll have to wait 24 hours there's no warning beforehand and they don't tell you anything about X number of logins remaining you just eventually get a warning saying that you've been locked out and you have to wait 24 hours the problem about that is eventually you get your email that says hey your grades are available go to the website to check your grades and unfortunately you're locked out so you have to wait the remaining time for that 24 hour window all the while wondering what your grades are so my recommendation to candidates is that you just wait until you get the email and then at that point go log in and check your grades also it seems that whenever there's a big change in the CCIE they say hey the last date to test is is this date whatever it might be February 24th for this year 2020 in the past and even this year I've seen that they open up new seats or they extend the amount of time when you can take the exam one person I saw on Twitter put up that they were trying to log in to check the seats and they were told that they need to check later due to the amount of logins so again be very mindful of how often you're logging into the site this next item is actually a hard pill to swallow for most candidates your configuration is wrong I can't tell you how many candidates swear that they've passed everything was working exactly as it should be and they swear that they passed the exam then they get their results back and it turns out that they failed and too often candidates will blame it other people they'll assume that Cisco is not great and properly they'll assume that the proctor is basically out to get them the moment that you start thinking like that that's the moment where you stop correcting your configuration you need to always assume that you missed something in the exam or that your configuration is wrong so when you look at it that way you keep it inside your control you understand that you need to figure out what it is you are doing wrong instead of blaming it on somebody else this is a huge problem that candidates make if you do it you're going to you know continue to fail the exam you're going to continue to miss the points and the longer you go trying to take the exam without making progress the higher the likelihood that you're going to burn out and just eventually quit chasing the CCAT so make sure that you keep things within your own control understand that you're doing something wrong if you're not getting the points figure out what you need to adjust make that adjustment and then execute in your next lab attempt this one is something that for some reason people just don't tell you about it it's the post cci you slump it's almost like a depression after you've passed the exam you think you'd be so excited you think you'd be so happy but for some reason after you pass the exam you have this slump you have this down period and for me I actually started looking into going into management I was so tired of dealing with technology it was it was my life it consumed me almost every hour of every day I didn't really care to have conversations with people I was thinking about my technology I was thinking about what I needed to do to pass the exam so when I finally passed you know I had forgotten how to have fun I wasn't keeping up with people so I didn't know who was doing what when I had no plans it was just this void if I had this almost like sole goal in life of passing the CCIE exam so imagine your one and only goal in life and you achieve it and then it's like what now you know you don't get any big change right after the fact you you expect that oh I'm a CCIE now and for me I didn't really expect that I expected nothing really but I guess maybe subconsciously I expected something because after the fact there was this like post CCIT slump I've talked to plenty of other candidates they've had it Tony II if you follow him on Twitter on YouTube he talks about how after the fact he kind of had this period of like a slump right so it's a real thing just understand that happens I understand it goes away it took me about probably a year for that to go away where I decide like I don't know what it was I just need to get mobile projects or something to occupy my mind and then as that happened as I started doing things I was interested in for technology again writing code working on exams whatever it might be you know that helped me get back into enjoying what I was doing and getting out of that slump so I don't know how long it takes other people if you have gone through that before and you remember how long it took you to kind of get back out of it and get focused please comment down below and let us know let's talk about the images in the exams bending who was actually the person who creates the CCIT collaboration exam he has some Cisco live presentations and I've looked at them and he puts up these particular scenarios of you know candidates or troubleshooting things in the lab once an error he gave was the picture of a screenshot of a phone up and you can see that the screenshot has these different soft keys at the bottom and the exam basically was saying you know make your phone look like this image it didn't say make your phone have these soft keys it's a make your phone look like this image well the candidates as I did that and I didn't get the points so Ben then puts up another image that shows what the candidate did and yes it had the different soft keys that the image had however if you looked there's a button here which meaning which means that there's more soft keys so you've met the requirement in the sense that you put the proper soft keys you missed the requirement in the fact that it said make your phone look like this phone and your doesn't because you've added to it there's a lot of other tasks where you can do that you can be a little creative and add in some extra things and one of Ben's Cisco live presentations he admits that they're grading against you meeting the task so if you add in some additional config that's fun as long as you need the task the problem here is that the task was an image and it said to make yours look like the image you added to it now you've made the images you know be different so basically there's some games out there where you can look at two different images and you can find what's the difference between the images you know where they look almost exactly the same it's kind of like that game look at your phone screenshot look at their screenshot make sure that there's no discrepancies so for me when I was doing workbooks if somebody had an image of say like Cisco jabber and there was four missed calls I would call into my jabber client at four times and not answer them and make sure I had four missed calls when I left the exam that's how granular I was getting with it and it's best to be that way let's talk next about strategy you have to have a strategy when you go into the exam room mark snow had a strategy where he would type up all of his configuration into notepad plus plus and then that way he could then paste it into his iOS config later I adopted that strategy as well the other thing I did was I would type the least amount of letters in notepad plus plus I would type the least amount of letters for entering a command so if I want to go into you know if I want to even just do a show command show voice Compaq brief I think was show boy show call active voice compactor so mine would say show show call act boko something like that but everything was abbreviated to the least amount of button key presses that I had to do I really liked that from Mark snows approach so I adopted that Kevin Wallace had an approach where he had a little um like a document where he would draw out and it would have each and every device write each server and each iOS device and then it would have their subtasks listed out in the order that they should be done right so then he would go to one device and he would do the configs on it and then he would one line the subtasks that he did I liked that approach as well you can find it online if you really want to see him explain how he did it so I adopted that approach as well another strategy that I had was I would not test any of my configuration until I had gone through the entire exam and did all of the configurations here's why some candidates will get into the exam and they will do the first task or whatever it might be then they'll start doing show commands and they'll start testing the features or whatever it might be they'll start doing their work in testing they're invalidating their configuration right what does that end up doing they find something wrong now they spend an hour let's say troubleshooting that thing that they found wrong you're not going to get that time back now you're gonna have the wrong mindset you're gonna be off your game for me I'd go through the whole config soup-to-nuts get it all done and then when I was done I'd step away to go get some water or use the restroom or whatever and then I'd come back and I would start testing and then whenever I found anything wrong I've troubleshoot that but at least I knew that my entire config was done so if I lose points on this one task that if I just don't get through the troubleshooting then at least I don't lose points on everything else that I didn't complete because I completed it also something that a lot of people say is that if you can get done with all of your lab configuration by lunchtime then the likelihood that you'll find their mistakes and be able to read through the exam and notice what you missed that that's really high but you should leave at least two hours at the end of the exam just for rereading the exam and for testing your configuration troubleshooting and fixing any of your problems at least two hours at the end of the exam should be spent on that this next one gets back to something I mentioned earlier somewhat Cisco live presentations go check them out there are people that develop these exams that make Cisco live presentations and there are going to be some really good nuggets of information in there the whole presentation that itself might not help you too much but the little bits of information that are in there that provide clarity are extremely helpful they cannot be replaced I didn't find them anywhere else you can create a Cisco live account free and then you can go in there and browse the Cisco live presentations and see what the proctor or not the proctor but see what these people are saying about the CCI you go in there find your particular exam if you can check it out I guarantee you it's going to be a value for this last one get on social media I wasn't on social media very much I had Facebook and that was it I didn't have any Instagram I didn't have Twitter I didn't really do much on YouTube none of that but looking back if I were to do it again knowing what I know now I would be on social media a lot more now you're going to have to manage it if you're getting on social media and you're spending a lot of time there you're not studying you're not focused on what you should be on so why do I say go and get on social media I say it because there's a lot of other people out there going through the same journey there's a lot of other people out there studying the same exam as you and probably your spouse isn't going through it with you your kids aren't studying it your co-workers aren't studying it in fact only three percent of people in the field get their CCIE so you are going to be among a very very small percentage of people you can be on social media interacting with other folks who are going through the same exact journey that you're going through now getting back to saying you know you need to manage your time about being on social media a friend of mine used to use an application or a software camera border was that would actually only allow them to log into Facebook and other applications between specific times if it was outside of that time and he went to go log in it would tell him hey you know you can't log in right now refocus on what you need to be doing my approach was that I would actually delete Facebook off my phone I I got to the point where I was logging into Facebook so infrequently that I would forget my password I have to go and reset it so while it's good to be connected and while it's good to go and reach out to other people that are going through the same version through the same journey as you you have to manage your time make sure that you're not going in law - there's social media stuff too much if you are a current CC IU candidate or your CC AE who's gotten their number or even if you are a candidate who just you know burned out or whatever it might be and or you know sometimes there's life circumstances that get in the way and people just don't get to continue on the journey they have to you know cut ties with it and go a different way regardless of any of that if there's something I didn't mention here but you think a CCI candidate should know please comment down below and you know share your knowledge with everyone else so that they can understand what they need to be doing moving forward on this journey I hope the video is a value and as always I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Patrick Kinane

Views: 6,659

Keywords: cisco, ccie, cisco ccie, mentor, tutorial, lab, exam, candidate, cisco cert, certified, certification, expert, Collaboration, CCIE Collaboration, Collaboration CCIE, CCNP Collaboration, Collaboration CCNP, Kevin Wallace, CCIE Certification, cisco collaboration, ccie lab, collaboration lab, cisco unified communications manager, lab strategy, cucm, ccm, callmanager, ios, strategy, proctor, how to, who, when, where, how, networking, enterprise, R&S, Route, Switch, Wireless, Datacenter, Data Center, Security

Id: T6XbbN5TGdc

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020