CCIE Journey Update - May 9th 2021

hey welcome back to my basement this is jeremiah wolfe and i wanted to give a quick update on uh ccie progress um i know a lot of you guys are interested usually one of my better performing videos uh not that i'm trying to make a youtube channel or out of this i'm just sharing for fun and accountability and you know to share okay so uh real quick uh for those of you who are new i left it in 2013 was out of i.t last year my wife we got pregnant i decided to get back in i.t because the thing that i was doing just wasn't making enough money i need to make more money so i'm getting back in i t so i've been studying since then things kind of went off the rails in september of last year when my wife ended up in the hospital and we our child was born premature and then it's basically it was almost six months of kind of i just wasn't able to do anything so i just finally got back to studying in um what february march and but it's been very slow going so that's where we're at right now so let's kind of take a quick look here so um what's new is in march i passed the pcap which is the python associate exam and then today is a couple days ago i passed in here in may on the 7th i think it was i passed the cisco dev devnet associate exam so let's talk about these a couple things real quick first off um basically my philosophy is if i have to learn it i'm going to get a certification why a lot of people like get angry at me for doing this and the process the reason is simple i don't know what the future holds anything could happen so i want myself i want to be in a position so that if you know hits the fan at least i have a fallback plan so even if i don't make it to getting the ccie you know i don't know why but if something happens i have these other certifications hopefully i'll be able to get a job that's the thought process so you know along the way there's a couple things that ended up wasting me a crap ton of time first off is the linux plus look i don't really know linux i needed to learn linux i said hey i'll do the linux plus it's been around for forever it should be a good exam i was wrong it's a horrible exam it's a giant giant waste of time and money don't do the linux plus i wasted because i really struggled with it i had a hard time finding good study material i think i spent eight weeks eight weeks two whole months studying for this thing and it was all wasted time i literally i kicked myself every time i think about it i should have just sat down found a website done a couple of the courses on cbt nuggets or something i could have done gotten the more i could have gotten better information better training in a matter of two weeks three weeks just playing around on my own and you know reading what whatever it was a waste of time the second thing is the devnet associate that i just finished another huge waste of time i have to know for the cci exam there are some scripting um automation things that we need to do so there i believe there's some ansible we need to do there's some python we need to do uh you know we don't need to work with some of the the older cisco i i mean what's it called uh i can't remember what it's called i forget the the built in cisco scripting the old old style um so i need i need to learn all this stuff i really haven't done much with it so i'm very happy that i took the time to do the python institute courses get my pcep and my pc ap those were well worth it and they weren't too difficult of an investment of time the pcep took me like two weeks the pcap i think took me three weeks uh maybe it was four weeks but that honestly that was just with the kid and i have not been studying anywhere near i've been doing about half uh at what i used to what i was doing before the kid so i'm trying to kind of ramp that up you know as he gets more and more he's been sleeping better most of the time we've had a few rough nights this weekend for some reason but he's getting better and i'm trying to hopefully get back into the groove of things and at least during the week hopefully i can get back to studying at near the levels that i used to um okay so i'm happy with the pcea ep pcap the dev devnet associate was a huge waste of time again because i wasn't studying at my full rate i think i spent six weeks on it i had planned three weeks to study for it um but it took six because i was just it just took me it was one i've been honestly just between you and me so let's let's uh let's have some some real talk because looks and i i hate youtubers who are always exuding everything's great everything's great that's not the real world that's you and i know that but social media just like it kills me because it it presents this false narrative that that everyone else is doing great but your life is you're struggling well listen let me tell you i've been struggling uh i've been struggling with just this whole thing with the kid look i don't want to get into all the emotions of it but this isn't the life that i had planned and it's really been weighing on me emotionally and i just i've had a hard time getting motivated you know getting back into it it's been a year now i expect it to be done by now i expected to have my ccie done and there were six months that i just was i didn't study at all for five and a half six months something like that and then getting back into it is just going so slow so i gotta say like emotionally it's really affected me and i'm having a heck of a time getting back into it passing this devnet associate i i'm feeling a little bit better and feel a little more motivated i'm actually looking forward to the next couple exams so i you know i i'm feeling better but it's been rough you know it's been rough to to know that it's i've already spent a year a year and i'm not done with this and not only am i not done i still got a ways to go that was not the plan when i set out to do this now part of that was the original plan was like nine months because i was expecting the ccie 5.5 which was routing and switching something that i knew very well and it was mostly going to be review and then taking it up a notch for me even though it'd been years since i've done it i knew i could get back into it pretty quick but that's not what the new ccie enterprise is cci enterprise infrastructure is routing and switching and sd-win and dna center and automation all these things that i didn't didn't even exist like they didn't even exist when i was a senior engineer just you know a few years ago it like blows my mind how much has changed so yeah it's i gotta say it's it's been it's been a little bit of a struggle it's true struggle it's been hard to get keep motivated and you know my wife has been great and every everything's great like you know i couldn't ask for a better situation as far as support and and whatever and you know comments and stuff really helped me out but uh it's been it's been struggle so i just want to be honest about that because this is hard and i don't want to pretend that it's not hard it is hard and um yeah so that's where we're at devnet associate sorry was a waste of time it's it feels like a a comptia test it's like a high level like they want you to know a lot about or rather a little about a lot of things but it doesn't actually prepare you to do anything passing the exam i'm not actually prepared to do anything i didn't learn any skills i learned a bunch of trivia i was you know some of my existing skills were validated i memorized a ton of stuff that no one in their right mind would ever memorize no actual person would memorize they would simply look it up or they would learn it over time as they did it every day like i hate when tests make you memorize stuff that you will not need to memorize in the real world that is it's stupid and it's it's almost like deceitful so cisco used to do that years ago used to be all this crazy memorization and like gotcha questions and stuff like that they haven't done that in years and i feel like whoever's doing this devnet uh certification like they they're bringing it all back and it pisses me off because i feel like cisco certifications should be better than that they mean more than that and this is like a trivia exam it feels like a comptia exam and it was a waste of time and a waste of money don't do it okay so that's where we're at now let's talk about where you know what the plan was so in the plan was march 17th to get the pcap uh yeah um i meant to fix that uh i didn't i didn't get that till april uh mid april so i was well off course that pushed the devnet back it was supposed to be you know late april ended up being early may that's pushing everything back uh sd-wan i'm currently figuring like six weeks but um i think it might be like eight weeks this is all new to me i don't really know what i'm getting into and labbing it i you know it's going to be a bit of a challenge so i'm not sure how how well this is going to go i'm hoping uh you know mid-june but it might be late june and then the design course i'm pretty confident about design that should be better it's going to be a lot of memorization i know there's going to be a lot of memorizing platforms and and you know best practices and stuff but that shouldn't be that bad so i i'm hoping i can knock that out in three weeks or four weeks so it's this is probably going to be later and then so this is probably going to be later so i was going to i was thinking about doing the enterprise automation exam i'm done i'm not going to do that i think what's on the ccie exam it's pretty specific it's laid out pretty decent in the exam objectives and i think i'll be wasting my time i wasted my time on the devnet associate and i'm probably going to be wasting my time doing this i'm just going to teach myself those handful skills in the lab and just do it myself i think it'll be a lot faster than doing this enterprise automation i might have actually bought the book so i'll flip through it maybe i'm wrong i don't know we'll see what happens but i'm probably almost certainly not going to be doing ian auto at this point so that puts me at mid to late july for be done with the other exams before i move straight into studying you know just going right into labs for the um the actual cci lab now i have literally i can kind of see it from where i'm at but maybe 10 different thick volumes that i i need to read during this time i don't know if i can get through all those in three months and actually like learn it i got a ton of labs to do i'm going to get back on um ine because they have much more lab focused training so probably watching some of their videos so i'm saying three months but it might be four months so we're looking november probably more like december maybe even january which just kills me just kills me uh but it is what it is i mean this is where i'm at like god i did not think this was gonna take this long so it's just k it's just it's whatever it is what it is so that's where we're at um this one isn't as you know it's not as hopeful and as maybe uh some of my other videos i'm not necessarily a woohoo kind of guy but uh so that's this look this is where it's at i want to share the reality of it and you know when i got some more to share i'll come back and i'll let you guys know where we're at then so uh hey thanks for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Jeremiah Wolfe

Views: 1,727

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: CCIE, Cisco Certification

Id: e6aOzj6b5OA

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Sun May 09 2021