Cisco 200-301 CCNA || Exam Passed - Here are my thoughts.

hey okay jeremiah here so about a week ago i released a video after completing the encore exam and a couple people have asked me if i would share similar uh make a similar video sharing my thoughts about the ccna exam and talk about the tools i used to study someone also asked if i could share some of my study [Music] tactics you know just general kind of methods methodology so i'll make a separate video for that too all right so ccna first off so i did this about six or seven weeks ago now um here's my exam report and so i scored uh 947 out of 825 required to pass i think i did pretty good on it and here is the individual zoom in a little bit more there we go the individual components so uh yeah overall i did pretty good so i'm happy with this so let's talk a little bit about the exam um now as i said in the encore video i'm not going to give away anything specifically on this amp exam i don't want to run afoul of cisco and you know whatever i signed when i took the exam that said i i don't even remember what was on the exam you know like i took this uh six or seven weeks ago and then i went right into encore so i don't even remember what was specifically on the exam and we can take a quick look at the exam topics as delineated by cisco if you want but you know you could do that on your own time too so no sense getting too far into that so anyway what did i use to well first off let me let's talk about the exam um i really really enjoyed this test and for a couple of reasons so you might be aware if you've watched any of my other videos or you know you see me in a discussion group i left networking in 2013. i pursued a business i took one of my sort of hobbies slash passions something i had been doing uh i started doing actually 20 years ago and then in 2006 i started a business doing it part time when i could which was really hard being a professional network professional i just worked a lot of hours so when i could i you know i did that on the side and then in 2013 after some changes in my life which maybe we'll talk about in another video i want to do some videos on some of the war stories of uh network professionals you know give give some people starting off some things that you know be aware of might happen your career how to be a little more savvy maybe than i was but um so some changes there are some changes in my life in my career and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to pursue uh to take this thing that had been a part-time at when i had time business and take it full-time so i've been doing that for seven years now so i've been over seven years i have been out of networking for a while my life is changing again my wife is pregnant and um we decided that uh just for many reasons not the least of which is monetarily it makes more sense for me to get back into networking now it's probably gonna take some time before i can get back to the financial position i was in before i left but even so even if it's a you know two or three years of me kind of or more slogging there eventually i'll get back there and it'll be worth it for my family um so why do i like this exam well for me i took this exam as sort of a proof of concept i was asking myself you know can i still do this now i haven't really done a whole lot of technical stuff in the meantime i worked with people one-on-one as a coach as a therapist i sold online courses now as part of that i did teach myself php and javascript so you know and so you know css and other web stuff so i you know i built a website and and built some tools for the website so i still you know enjoyed technical stuff you know i still play with arduino like that screen behind me lights up and makes patterns and stuff that's all computer controlled so i like technical stuff i'm a technical kind of guy but i hadn't done networking in years so when i got into the ccna it was sort of a proof of concept can i do this and you know i started off with the the book so you're probably aware there are two books uh volume 1 and volume 2 200-301 the official cert guide and first off i enjoyed the books i think were they written by different guys no same guy well written there's typos you know but if you're paying attention you're not going to get thrown off by them but well written definitely i'm trying to think of how to word this best but my my thought is that if you are getting into networking if you're relatively green getting into networking this really is a great starting point or if you've been you know kind of on the periphery maybe doing a help desk job or doing maybe you've been primarily desktop or server stuff and now you want to move into the network stuff this is it's it's a great it's a great way to do that this these two books and this test it covers a broad range of topics let's take a look at them real quick i don't want to go super in depth uh network fundamentals uh so you're talking about routers layer two layer three talking about wireless some basics of design different types of cables and power over ethernet so you know so from a networking standpoint you're kind of you're getting into everything at a you know at a high level but when you finish this exam and if you do well on this exam i feel that if i was a hiring manager and i have been in that position many many times that if someone had this new ccna exam on the cert under their belt i would feel pretty confident that they were in a good position to be in a junior level position within a networking organization so a junior level engineer or you know maybe even uh sort of maybe later tier two knock position something like that so it's it covers a lot of stuff but it's really positioning you well and i think it's a good it's a good foundation and it's really going to position you to kind of jump start your networking career now most of this stuff well else here most of it yeah most of it i was already very familiar with let me try to get myself in frame a little bit better here work um you know like i said i've done this for years i first got my ccna in 2000 so 20 years ago even at the time though i was still doing primarily windows stuff i was a server guy for quite a while windows servers and eventually i think was around 2004 i finally actually officially got a job in networking and did that until 2013. so i had done most of this this stuff like especially the the core networking stuff routing switching um you know stuff like that access lists i've done thousands of access list you know interface configurations i've done thousands and thousands of interface configurations vlans vtp expansion like i've done all that stuff tons of it so that was all easy automation and programmability this was from a from a networking position all new to me now i do i've always been a bit of a you know coder i taught myself basic when i was you know 12 on my commodore 64. so and i've always written code since in fact i will say that it's funny because one of the way this is almost like it bums me out in some weird sense that this is um becoming such a core part of networking because one of the ways i've really distinguished myself in my earlier career was in by doing scripting and automation you know one of the last things i did before i left my last position was i built a tool in perl that walked our network and checked all the interfaces it used snmp so i would query the snmp mib i would take that data i would parse it in perl and i would build a database of all the interfaces in our network and all of the vlans on every interface now we we had literally thousands of vlans it was not the best design but it's kind of anyway not important but so we had thousands of vlans some of them were trunked across multiple states and multiple data centers some of them were local and my tool built all in perl would walk the network figure all that stuff out and then you could query the database and it would give you the path of a vlan through the network so it was a really nice little tool but that was one of those things that you know this is one example of ways that i was able to really distinguish myself in my career because i enjoyed coding and most of my peers didn't even know where to begin so um it kind of bums me out that now everybody has to do that because i'm not special anymore so uh your security uh you know i i used to be very familiar with security stuff uh although security it changes all the time so a lot of that was new um anyway i'm kind of getting rambling a bit here my point is that i really had a lot of experience with at least 50 probably more like 60 to 70 percent of the stuff on the exam so because of that uh you know reading the book was pretty easy it was pretty much review for me um and um the exam itself was pretty easy so but i i you know i'm not trying to make this sound like you know look how special i am i just want to be clear that it's really not a fair comparison since most people are not doing their ccna with as much experience as i have had now if you're just getting into networking this is a great place to start it you know i spent a couple weeks studying and then i took the test i think if you're just starting off you know reading these books going through really practicing what's in the books there is a lot of information here and if you're if it's new to you it's going to take a while so you know i wouldn't be surprised if you have to set aside three or six months you know to work on this and i'm not trying to i don't want to bum anyone out who was thinking that this is going to be super quick if you're experienced this could go pretty quick if you're just starting off it's going to take you a while but i want you to know that when you're done you're going to have a really good foundation a really good foundation in networking and i don't know how ccna has been perceived over the past decade since i've kind of been out of it i really haven't hired people at the ccna level in a very long time um i was mostly hiring professional and ie level people so i haven't really interviewed and you know thought a whole lot about ccna in a very very long time but um if i was a hiring manager today and kind of knew about this exam this would have this would have a lot of merit in my view so i really think this is worth pursuing okay so that being said let's take a quick look at reading the book obviously that is um that's always my number one tool for studying there you know if you want to do something like the cbt nuggets i like cbt nuggets i did not look at them for this test if you're just starting off it would probably be good just to get another perspective sometimes reading just reading the book isn't enough what i'd what i did use however let's come over here so i used the boson netsim lab simulator tool thing now this is expensive this is like 150 or 180 dollars it's expensive but i really did like it especially if you're new to um cisco and you're just you know you're trying to get in here get started off this is going to get you on the command line it's going to get you used to doing the commands now so this is just the ccna okay there got to be what 200 150 labs here it's way overkill way overkill so i have two big frustrations about this this tool uh one excuse uh the first thing is it's just too much it's too much i mean you would spend weeks and weeks going maybe that's okay if you have the time maybe that's okay but it's kind of disjointed it looks like some of the labs are intended to build on themselves so it's kind of like taking you through you start off at zero and the next lab you build a little more you build a little more and you build a little more so it looks like at some point they built a comprehensive ccna a lab group of scenarios that were all interconnected and built on each other in a coherent way and then at some point they just started adding random labs and now it's all jumbled up and so you'll get a random lab and then the next one seems to be related to something you did four or five labs ago so they seem like they really are trying to go for quantity over quality i'm not really sure you know why you need to do some of these they have some of these labs they got four or five versions of the lab why you need to do them over and over and over again there is benefit in learning to you know type out all the commands there there definitely is some benefit to it um it was funny when i sat down to do this and you know you sit down and just my my fingers remembered so many of the commands that even though i hadn't thought about them in years my fingers just remembered them because i just typed them thousands and thousands of times over the years so so i like it i like it i liked it for me for getting kind of back into it and building up my confidence a little bit because i had not done it in so long i like it for someone who is just starting out and really does need to get some time on the command line and probably is not going to have access to lab gear if you're someone who works in the field already and you're kind of doing the ccna as a way of formalizing your experience you're probably not going to get a whole lot out of this just to be honest so but i i liked it i liked it and then now what my favorite one of my favorite study tools of all time is the bosun exams i love boasting exams and for this for the ccna their practice exams are just spot on just spot on now it's it's not a brain dump right so you're not seeing questions that are on the exam good because that just pisses me off uh but it is really they've done a really great job of capturing the this this style of cisco questions the type of cisco questions in the material that you need to know after there's when you when you get this you get three exams a b and c each exam has a 102 questions on it says a total of 306 questions within the package uh just when i open this up there was an update by the way so they're they're actively updating it and just spot on so the way that i always recommend doing this is let's bring this over here when you when you do one of these exams i recommend doing it twice so there's there's two examples excuse me three exams a b and c and i recommend doing only one per day especially the first time through so you're gonna on one day you'll do a on another day you'll do b and it's going to take you a couple of hours to get through this because the way i recommend it is you go through you do the questions let's see if i if i can get this right what's your phone cisco lightweight ap modes can form a mesh when enabled on multiple aps a mesh i don't know let's say bridge show answer hey i was right okay so when you you select your answer you hit show answer it's going to show you the answer fantastic but it's also going to give you a really detailed explanation as to why why that answer is the right answer it's going to tell you where they got their information from oftentimes it's like this one it happens to be right out of the cert guide right out of the book right but many times it's not many times they're pointing at cisco documentation i remember there was something that linked to a nsa document about security policies or something so you know it's if you have time it's great to go read those so whether you get it right or you get it wrong read these explanations you're going to end up reading a lot there's a lot of material but this makes it a whole other tool for learning not just a review so you go through once do the practice test where you read each of the explanations i recommend you do each exam that way a b and c and i also recommend that you take at least only you know a maximum one per day once you've done that so that it gives your brain time to digest everything which is such an important concept that most people don't necessarily honor the idea that your brain takes time to digest information i'll talk about this in stutter study strategies video the importance of understanding how your brain works and using that knowledge to maximize your ability to learn as quickly as possible and retain as much as possible but anyway and then once you've gone through each of the three exams then go back a second time and do the exams again at the second time i usually do two a day so i'll do a and b on one day and c on the on the next day and that second time you really should be able to get a very high score if you can get a very high score 950 then you're pro you're ready for the actual exam for this for this uh boson ccna uh it's not true for all the products but for the ccna definitely true if you can get a high score on the practice exam you're going to get a high score on the actual exam most likely but that's only if you're getting that high score on your second time through if this is your third or your fourth time through the exam you're going to get a false reading because your brain whether or not you intended to has started to memorize the questions and answers and so what you're going to find is you're not actually picking the answer because it's the right answer you're picking it because you remember it and that's can be really bad it could help you with the exam excuse me uh but more more than likely it's going to hurt you so i only ever do these exams twice once to go through very slowly take two or three hours sometimes to read all the the answers and then a second time to just cement that information make sure i actually got it so those are the tools that i used the uh the book the boston practice exam and the bose and netsim the other thing that i did was there was there's a bunch of stuff in these books um that you just kind of have to memorize i kind of feel like you know at a certain point memorization back in the day right back in the day i remember for my cisco acrc exam advanced cisco router configuration you had to memorize commands and they weren't multiple choice they weren't even in a simulator with like uh contextual help no you had to memorize the command and during the exam it would say what command would you enter to you know enable this feature with these settings and you would there'd be a little text box and you would have to type the exam the uh command in exactly and i remember i was on an airplane uh once i was flying somewhere and i had this stack of flash cards and i'm just trying to memorize hundreds of cisco commands something that's silly in my opinion because you have you have help you have documentation why memorize all this stuff um so i'm not i'm not big on memorization for these i don't i'm not impressed when someone memorizes all these little facts and figures about a technology i am impressed if you understand how it works why it works how it interoperates with other technologies that's what you need to be a successful engineer and knowing where to look when you need to know well what's the default timer for this or you know what's the default whatever setting for something like that's all out there you can look that up but knowing how and why things work how they work together that's what makes a successful engineer so i get a little frustrated if i have any frustration with this exam it's there is quite a bit you have to memorize it's all in there you know things like the hsrp um uh mac addresses and the timers and stuff like that you gotta know uh you gotta know all that um you gotta know the ipv6 um network numbers uh multicast numbers all that stuff you got to be able to do subnetting uh i do think there's value in subnetting i'm not trying to say that but there's a lot of stuff that you have to memorize that uh some of it there's value in some of it not so much so but if it's in here you better know it so anyway that was the kind of point that i was getting to was that once i'd gone through the tests the practice labs the books i did go back through the books and i made lists of all the things that i needed to memorize and i sat down and memorized those just in an afternoon it's not a big deal and then you know in the morning before i took the test i pulled those sheets back out went back through them and excuse me look through them again so i'm not usually big on notes but when you have to memorize all kinds of crazy stuff like that i will take some very specific notes so i did that for this okay um that's really it there's there's not a lot a whole lot to it uh this video is kind of long but uh there's really not that much to it it's it's a great exam i just i i just love it because i really do think it's preparing you it's giving you such a good base of knowledge in the exam when i took the exam the questions i felt were worded were structured in a way that really did test test you in a good way tested that you understood the information it wasn't just about memorizing you know numbers and facts and figures it really did a good job as good as you can in that kind of testing environment to test your your ability to understand what you had been studying so i like the exam i like the material i think this is a great certification um those are my thoughts i hope you found some of this insightful all right this is jeremiah see you next time

Channel: Jeremiah Wolfe

Views: 5,732

Rating: 4.9795918 out of 5

Keywords: Cisco, CCNA, 200-301, Boson

Id: HUhFLeeLlsU

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020