Cisco ENCOR 350-401 || Exam Passed - My Thoughts & Study Tools

hey this is Jeremiah I just passed the 350 - 401 Cisco encore exam I thought I'd quickly make a video with some of my thoughts talk a little bit about what I did to prepare for it what tools I used and you know maybe it'll help you out maybe not we'll see what happens for you first thing let's come over here here's my exam report and as you can see I passed by the skin of my teeth 8:39 I gotta tell you you know I'm taking this exam the entire time I was just like every question I'd be like next I'm just shaking my head I failed I failed this this is this is by far one of the hardest exams I have ever done for a Cisco now if you've been following me at all you know that I left I T back in 2013 and I'm just preparing to get back into IT and I'm working on my CCIE in order to do that to kind of create a you know create a resume or just the the appearance that I know what I'm doing and I feel that one of the best ways to do this do the CCAA so that's kind of my goal I'm working on that now for the past seven plus years I left IT and I was pursuing a business that kind of turned one of my passions into a business I've been doing that for a while but recently my wife became pregnant and after years of trying and all kinds of insane amount of money spent on the effort we're finally pregnant and it just it felt like it was best for the both of us if I got back into IT it'd be more stable honestly be better income if I can get back to the level that I used to enjoy so this is my score 350 at a 401 I want to talk a little bit about the test what I experienced and then we'll talk a bit about what I used to prepare I'm sorry I just ate a couple of Nutter butters my mouth is all salivating Nutter butters tasty I haven't eaten anything all day like I don't know I wanted to be just liked when I go into the exam so I hadn't eaten anything and I took this exam at 10:15 so it's just starting to get hungry by the end of the exam so I thought I just want to sit down and make this video so it's real quick there was a package of Nutter butters on the counter in the kitchen so I grabbed a couple and now I'm salivating alright first off if you haven't done one of these Pierson online exams just talk about that real quick you need to basically wait works you go in when it's when it's time for your exam you log in to the website the website send you a link to a to your phone you then use your phone to fill out some information you have to take a picture of your driver's license you need to take I think it's five pictures of your testing area so from like from the back facing forward from the front facing back from the left from the right I guess I'd be four pictures and then you also need a picture of yourself in the testing environment so you're taking all these pictures I had trouble with it recognizing my driver's license and here in Ohio the driver's license has like Holograms on it so you know it's I'm sure that's what was causing the problem but I don't know what you can do like any kind of light that hits you need light to be able to take a picture and any light causes the Holograms to show and and block that whatever it eventually took it once you do that you log in now a few weeks ago I took my CCNA and I sat there after completing the process i sat there for an hour and a half waiting for someone to come on someone never came on I eventually just logged out I opened a trouble ticket and then I said you know let me just try again even though it's an hour and a half after an hour after my scheduled time I tried again went through the whole process all the pictures and everything and someone came right on and I took the test so if you know you've been sitting there for twenty or thirty minutes waiting for someone I would recommend just logging off and doing the whole thing over again it only takes a few minutes to take the pictures and get in there that process was fine they come on you know you have to have a webcam they watch through the entire time and this oh and you can't have multiple monitors so you have to like take if you have multiple monitor go take one down and make sure there's no pens or paper or anything I will say for the CCNA exam I wish I had a piece of paper because there was some subnetting questions luckily they were they work too bad you could do it in your head but for this encore exam I was fine I never even once thought about a piece of paper so so that was fine they did have they took an issue with me I was sitting here like this looking at the screen and they took issue that came up by they opened up a chat window and told me to remove my hand from my face or they would fail me so yeah so no even none of this none of this I you know I was sure like okay like you know they don't want you to cover your mouth really I thought this would be okay but whatever so okay so that's that now I do want to give us a little bit of background here so I've been out of IT for a while as I've mentioned a couple times here already since 2013 so seven plus years I've been out of IT and so I'm a little bit rusty but I do want it when I'm kind of talking about my experience I do want to explain that I do have a bit of history with Cisco exams with exams in general now I started with Microsoft I kind of went through my MCSE I built a whole little career out of that before switching into Cisco and if we look here I passed my first CCNA exam in February of 2000 so 20 over 20 years ago I got my C C and a and here are all the Cisco tests I've taken sense so I've taken a few tests I do want to show this just because it was a proud moment in my career from May 12th to May 27th so 25 days it was that right 15 days in 15 days I passed for Cisco professional level exams to get my Cisco certified security professional CCSP and basically is one of those things where the company came to me and said we have to have this for our Cisco partnership we can't hire anybody because everyone is too expensive we don't know what we're going to do and I said I can pass it in a month just let me work from home for a month I can do all four tests but I wanted $20,000 raised and they said okay so I went home and I did it in two weeks so I know how to study I know how to pass tests and I've taken a lot of Cisco tests so when I kind of talked about this exam I want you to know that you know I do have a little bit of history there I'm not not a complete noob so so this exam what was on the exam well I don't wanna get in trouble Cisco I actually knew a guy who got in trouble with Cisco it was more than telling what was on the exam but he ended up in prison and that was fined two million dollars so which he had to pay so don't with Cisco like that's the whole story anyway so what was on the exam basically everything in this book was on the exam it was a hundred just over a hundred questions hopefully that's not breaking any NDA thing that you had to sign just over a hundred questions I think we had two hours I used just about an hour to get through it and again everything in this book I couldn't believe the one of the things about this exam that is different than any other exam I've covered that I've taken excuse me is that the the encore there are so many topics like just I've never taken a test that covered such a broad range of topics and you need to you need to know them all like you really do I mean I barely passed so I'm not trying to kind of you know put myself off as if I am the master of everything this book I am far from that in preparation for my cci I will say that the stuff that I didn't do very well at least that I know that I didn't do well on was things that I know I have a long way to go anyway there's a lot more in-depth studying I need to do so I'm not worried about that and then the other part if you've read this book or you're going to you will find at some point there are entire sections of this book that read like marketing material it was kind of off-putting for me it's like oh hey here's this platform and it does you know it has all the marketing terms thrown in there I can't even I'm too tired my brains fried I'm not gonna pretend to be able to make up funny banter about marketing terms but I was reading through a couple chapters and I remember I told my wife at the time I'm like it's so weird it's like reading a freaking brochure it's the weirdest thing and so I I'll be I will admit I didn't take those sections too seriously I should have everything in this book so in terms of studying here is your number one source the official circ guide as always it's a monster of a book I will also say at least the first half of the book I have never read a Cisco book that was this dense and just it was like it was so freaking dense it was so hard to get through just to I mean I can't even I've never just struggled to read a book as you know going back over here my strategy for when I took these four tests to get my CCSP back in the day I read the book on day one I took the practice test on day two I took the exam on day three so I was reading an entire book in one day this thing took me well much much longer than that several weeks to get through now it was just so dense just so freakin dense so you're I would recommend you know if you're kind of like me you're used to you know like look Cisco tests are challenging but you still feel like okay if I read the book and and you know do some prep work I'm gonna generally be good I will say this is this is different so just right out of gate I will say this test is different take your time I wish I'd spent at least another week my thing is I I want to get at least a 900 on the exam to feel like I've done good so I passed it but and maybe I just sounds a bit least or ish but I want to get a 900 so I don't feel good about passing it I wish I'd spent another week I probably could have reread this I've only read it once I probably could have read it a second time I'm sure I would have picked up more so what else did I use to prepare so this was the big thing the book was number one for me secondly well so let me talk about this I I got I sign up for ine okay so I signed up for ine and what a freaking disappointment that was so I spent a hundred bucks luckily I only did the one month plan as opposed to the year now I'm going to come back to ine when it comes to the CCIE there's just not a lot of other training this sort of training available so I don't feel like I have a lot of choice I think they kind of know that they got you by the balls so when I came here I they you know you go to the Learning Path and you've got the CCE NP Enterprise Learning Path it is two hundred and fifty four hours two hundred fifty five hours of videos now a little more about 55 60 percent of that is for the encore exam the remaining 45 percent or so is for NRC so it's it's still only about I mean still 120 or 130 hours or whatever that works out to be of videos and so I spent a week with ine and that was a week that I wasted I'll just be a front and I'm not trying to on ine the training was good it wasn't good for the encore test and here's what happened we start off with land switching a my my account is expired so unfortunately I can't show you we start with LAN switching and they go in depth like crazy in depth into a spanning tree and MST and you know it was all really good information the problem was you don't need that level of depth for this exam so if you're coming to this and you're like well I'm gonna become an expert and as a bonus I'll just get around to eventually taking the exam that I Annie it's probably the way to go if you want to pass the exam as part of your journey and you recognize hey I'm gonna prepare for this exam and then I'm gonna move on and do more and more stuff then I knees probably not the way to go so here's the thing we do land switching we're doing this in-depth stuff about MST and after we've spent eight and a half hours then we come over here and we have the introductory course to rapid spanning tree and MST think about that for a second you start off with an advanced level course a CCIE focused course and all throughout the course they're talking about the CCIE lab and then you go into a professional level course where they introduce the concept that you've just done in depth seems odd then we come here ERP we spend eight hours 8 hours and EIGRP and it's getting pretty advanced this is another advanced level CCIE focused course on AI GRP well if you come over to the exam topics you only need to compare routing concepts of EIGRP in OSPF this is the only mention of eigrp in the course topics routing concepts to understand it at a high level be able to understand what makes it unique and different than other you don't need advanced configuration so I spent you know a day and a half to let's face it I can't sit there and watch eight hours straight of videos so I spent a day and a half that I wasted on material that you know ultimately as my journey as a network professional is good to know absolutely and my journey toward my CCIE is good to know fundamental in fact to know but for this exam I didn't need any of it I didn't need any of it so right out of the gate we've wasted in just in the first three courses we've wasted 16 and a half hours almost 17 hours of time that was just wasted so when you look at this and you're like oh my god they have 250 hours their competitors don't have anywhere near that do not be confused a lot of this is apparently I mean just by judging on the first few topics here is wasted time now I did actually contact ine and I said hey this is really weird why did we go super in-depth on MST in course 1 and then introduced MST in course 2 and they wrote back to me and told me that obviously I wasn't advanced enough to be taking this course and I should probably go spend some more time studying my CCNA it sounded like a dick response so I was a little frustrated with with that and then I also asked him about the HUP why are we spending 8 hours on the air chief I said is this was this just like kind of thrown together should I go through your topics because if you look at stuff from Keith Bogart he's done a ton of professional level courses he even has like AIG R P specific course at a professional level so why we're doing this anyway I'm getting off topic here so my my idea my takeaway I Andy was a waste of a hundred dollars of my money and it was a waste of a good week of my time so you know do with that what you will alright so what did I ultimately use what I did end up getting CBT Nuggets and I've never used CBT Nuggets before in fact I'm not even sure they were a thing back when I was still maybe they were I don't know I think about you know back when I was managing an engineering department and how I had to fight to get my guys trained because every course was three to five thousand dollars and so it was you know we were lucky to get a course and every now and then we were Cisco Gold Partner so we'd get learning credits that maybe we could use toward a course or toward some training lab gear or something but man it was just such a battle to get a good training and then now to have this CBT Nuggets for for sixty bucks a month they have all this training let me forget about this is Wow I mean just it's a crazy but and you know you could say the same thing about IME for that matter you know it's just such it's it's such a game-changer this just wasn't available back in the day to me at least again I don't think it was I wasn't aware of CBT Nuggets back then but I did their own core training it was 50 hours and I would say all of the training with just a tiny bit of exception was really focused towards what was on the exam it looks like I think some of the courses might have been reused I'm not you know I don't know but even if they were they were definitely on point and but it looks like the majority of the material was custom-made for this exam and it shows so even though this is a fraction of the time of ine I think it is a significantly more focused and better value there's like five different trainers I think throughout this entire program and you know everybody has different personalities there is one or two maybe that I just didn't love but and then there was a couple that I just like totally I was like I think that guy and I could be friends yeah we could be friends so you know like it's this is how it's gonna be right but overall you could tell that everybody is genuinely excited about the material they genuinely care about training it really comes through you know that the the over with the inee like this Brian McCann guy his his course was amazing because he you could just tell he knows his like really knows it and that was cool but it was also lacking in the enthusiasm bit whereas whereas with the CBT Nuggets they're not lacking enthusiasm even to a fault I would say and the the way that they do it were they break everything down into I think the longest video I watched was maybe a half hour and that was with labs the vast majority are right around the five to ten minute mark so they give you a concept and then we move on and it builds on itself and it just it flows a lot better I think it's a lot easier to retain because they do break it down like that it's not just like you're sitting there and staring at the screen and even if you are sitting there for hours on end staring at the screen it's still broken down so just it feels like you're making progress it feels like it's flowing better and it just the process seems better the other thing about CBT Nuggets which is really important is they have labs good labs and so when you log in to a you know some of these lessons will have a lab you open up the the lab tool it opens in a browser and I mean you're right on the command line so I I didn't even know that was a thing for them and it was it was great really good really good I enjoyed it quite a bit so what else did I use now speaking of labs I used the Bose in netsim and I know some people have a bug up there but the folks and that's them because they're like oh why don't you use viral or why don't you use even G or something well I bought a server I got me a big old honkin used server from Amazon let me tell you if you're if you're doing your CCIE you're not aware amazon has this reef server refresh program so you know Amazon like AWS right they pull their servers out they clean them up and they sell them at are pretty good as far as I can tell price so I got I don't remember what the it was Adele I got 40 cores 192 gig of ram 4 terabytes of disk for 800 bucks shipped so it's even overkill but I'm gonna be able to put whatever I want on it so I think that's a good deal I just don't have time to I didn't want to mess with all that just yet I've never installed a virtual server I've never messed with even G this is all gonna be a new journey for me I wanted something I just sit down and use and and the other thing is even if you do have that even G or that viral you you don't have lab scenarios and especially if you're trying to learn how to troubleshoot my point of view is that how do you learn to troubleshoot a system that you just set up from scratch and then even if it's broken you're the one that broke it so maybe there is some scenarios out there that are available I haven't really been able to find him yet but this this tool has it right for you they have the topology not everything works like you can't do just anything you want from the command line but anything that is necessary for the lab works so that's good and then between this I will say that quite honestly though I had bought this before I signed up for CBT Nuggets I don't think I would have got this and this isn't cheap this was like 150 or 180 bucks or something it ain't cheap and again I know you can get viral for 200 bucks or something through two or three hundred bucks it seems like such a waste of money but you're you're buying the the scenarios you're buying the the you know when you finish when you open up a the instructions that walks you through it gives you a little here's all the commands you need for this a thing here's what we want you to do and then it walks you through the solutions and shows all the output and everything and as you're doing the quill even ask you questions like why did you do it this way why when what what is the feature or functionality that necessitates you doing it this way or that necessitates it being configured in such a way and those questions are all answered down in the lab results so I do think this is a good study solution I would not have purchased it if I had known that CBT that I was going to get CBT Nuggets at the time and as you can see I didn't even finish half of these so this ultimately for me was a bit of a waste of money I just was running out of time I wanted to take the test and I didn't want to do this and quite frankly I was running into a problem where with a lot of these as the technologies are getting more advanced you know CCNA was pretty good as far as this tool goes but for this encore test there was a lot of Labs there is more than one way to do it to get the desired result I was sitting in on a Cisco call about the CCIE and they specifically said we don't do show runs we don't compare configs we compare at the result so can you communicate is the is the desired functionality functioning properly they don't look at show runs and of course not because there's just so many ways of doing things when you get to these advanced or more advanced levels so what I was fighting was I would do a lab everything would work and then I would go to grade the lab and it would say that I had gotten it wrong and here they didn't like you know how I had done something even though it's perfectly valid so I do like it as a tool in general I don't know I don't know if I'm gonna get it again we'll see we'll see what happens and then the final tool that I used is of course the the bosun exam sim and I gotta say I have I have been such a huge fan of bosun ever ever since my Microsoft days so for over 20 years I've always as long as there was bosun was an option I bought the bosun I think there was a dark period where they weren't doing too good maybe around the mid to late oh it's not what he said but the CCNA exam prep was right on I thought that was right on this encore prep was close it was definitely very good but there is so much material that they did not cover and that was just I was not prepared for when I got into the exam so luckily between the the three tools so between the book the CBT Nuggets and the bosun I was just barely as you saw my score just barely prepared enough but I was a little disappointed with the bosun this time around and you know I don't know how much I can fault them because again there's so many topics you know they're there I think they're their tools they have like 306 questions or just over 300 questions in the entire thing that they you know mix and match for the different exam practice exams but I feel like to be really prepared you would probably need 500 questions there's just so so many things they didn't cover and in a lot of the stuff that they covered that I thought when I was doing the practice exam was covered you know in depth enough as I was doing the actual exam nowhere near so this is what I would say if you're getting preparing for the test you need to be able to do the practice tests and get over 95% or 950 on your score and here's the other thing when it comes to doing these practice exams if you're doing it more than twice you're basically cheating because your brain is memorizing the questions and answers even if you're not actively trying to so if you had I only ever take the test twice the first time you know kind of prepare you know shows you what's on there and then if you're not aware oops not that no I didn't mean to do that sorry it's try this again if you're not aware one of the the reason that bosun is so fantastic is that if you hit show answer so you get this massive explanation and oftentimes there's links to pertinent documentation so I mean the thing I love about bosun is I learn so much just by taking the test because it's not just memorizing questions and answers you say oh I got that wrong and then you you learn about why it was wrong or you got it right and you learn about why it was right in detail so it is such a valuable valuable real not even showing it to you let's try this again yet such a valuable resource so when you when you show the you know take the answer you do show answer and then BAM it gives you the right answer and tells you why so very very valuable but again it's so man there's just so many questions they this really it did it did a good job but it was not what I usually expect from Bose and usually if I can do very high on a bosun test it has been my experience if I can if I my second time through if I'm getting ninety ninety five plus that's what I'm gonna get on the test this time I was getting ninety five plus on the practice test when I took the real test I barely passed so while very good great resource is not quite as good as it needs to be in my opinion okay so we hit about a half hour way too long you've probably lost interest that's my thoughts about this feel free to ask any questions alright I'm Jeremiah thanks

Channel: Jeremiah Wolfe

Views: 15,655

Keywords: Cisco, ENCOR, 350-401, Boson, CBTNuggets, INE, CCNP, CCIE

Id: ZczzQedXenY

Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020