How to Study for Cisco CCNA Certification Exam - CCNA Study Tips

[Music] it's been a while since you've actually been doing any type of studying at all and now that you're interested in it you want to earn an it certification well that means you have to get into certification exam mode and that may actually be a little bit more concentrated a little bit more technically challenging than you may have actually been led to believe so let's go ahead and talk about this idea of how in the world should we take a look at studying for any type of it professional certification exam well i'm going to actually show you some of the tips that i use as well as a lot of people end up using to help them to succeed on their very first certification test as well so i'm a cisco guy so i'm going to actually use of course well ccna to actually help us out when we actually choose to begin to study for it so let me go ahead and show you what i end up doing now as i've chosen that as an exam i'm going to go to the vendor's website and so let's go ahead and take a look and we'll show you that so once i get to the vendor's website i can type in any of my favorite search engines that are out there you can of course just type in cisco certifications and more than likely that will of course bring you to well this site as well okay and if you've actually heard say everybody wants to actually take a look at of course doing the ccna which is the most popular cisco certification that's out there well you'll see that there's different levels of them entry level associate level professional level expert level and even architect each one's described up there depending on the level that you want to jump in with if this is your first one i recommend that you actually do either the cct or the associate level the associate level is probably the one that you actually end up picking as well okay so when you select that well now what do i do you want to click on the link here and of course that brings you to a much more detailed and specific page that will of course give you some of the things that you're actually looking for notice i have a guide here that says exam topics additional study materials of course that you can purchase from cisco and from cisco press and other places and then their official e-learning stuff as well okay now what i'm looking for at the very beginning is just what is going to be on the exam well notice they have something called the exam topics now you'll hear this actually referred to all across the internet in different things you'll hear the term exam blueprint you'll hear the term exam objectives here of course we actually see the term exam topics but more than likely you'll hear the term exam blueprint very often in the cisco realm is what you'll hear you have a nice little description but now you have the breakdown of what's actually on each one of these topics now you can actually download this in a pdf format which i've already done and i want to show you that as well because this is where it's going to really help you out as you begin your study process as well so here it is it actually tells you the exam description how long it actually is going to be and it doesn't tell you how many questions that they're that there's actually going to be and that's because it can actually choose to change the number of questions so for example when i took it it was 102 questions okay but that doesn't necessarily mean this can be 102 for you so just realize that this is going to be true and always as you actually do this get the latest copy from the cisco the official certification page that we actually saw right there because these can change at any time if they choose to so make sure you get the latest one that you can and that will actually help you out now just when i say that doesn't mean that they'll change it every week but make sure you're actually studying on latest one that you can actually download as well so of course there'll be network fundamentals you actually will have another section then on network access but here i'm not going to go through the whole thing but notice they break down on the percentages and the topics that you actually take look at and choose to do so those will become very important because that's what's going to keep you on target to ensure that you're actually studying for the exam itself and in the proper manner that you need to okay so when we start doing something like that that's what we want to do now let me go ahead and give you some other tips as well to help you out as we start studying so the first thing like we said we'll download the exam objectives from the vendor and then what i want you to do of course is set a goal for your exam date okay and that's going to be key because that will actually help keep you motivated to ensure that you're studying on a daily basis now in any other exam you might be able to take a break from and if you do you've got to jump right back on the horse as soon as you can but overall though what you want to do is actually you want to have continuous uninterrupted study as you can in a on a daily basis because the exam knowledge as much as you're actually learning for a certification it can dissipate very quickly if you're not on it on a daily basis so set your goal let's say it's 30 days out 60 days out 90 days out that's all up to you but set it up so that you actually mark that on your calendar then that you're ready to go secondly what you want to do is you want to take some type of official or not official some type of assessment test one that may bring you into the environment of like a test that you'll take but it's a practice exam is what you're talking about okay and we'll talk about that a little bit more in detail in a moment i'll show you where you can actually get something like that as well have a plan on how you're going to study now what do i mean by the plan you want to make sure that you know what time of day you're going to study this should not be haphazard okay you should set it in the morning if you're actually good in the morning if you have the ability to if you have work you may have to set it after or you have to set it before but whatever it is you want to make sure that you can dedicate some time in the day how many sessions are you going to do per day the sessions are up to you whether you're talking about 30 minutes an hour or 90 minutes i recommend those intervals of time that you can do uninterrupted is what you can do are you going to do two sessions or are you going to do three sessions i do not recommend a marathon eight hours a day your mind just can't handle it that way so i say a max of three sessions take 15 minute breaks in between and you actually be ready to go as well do not give yourself more than 15 or your mind will start to wander so make sure you actually do those in particular have a set place and gather all the resources that you need to study do not have them scattered about have them gathered and ready to go as you're starting your session that way everything is within reach this includes things like snacks that you need as well as of course any type of refreshment that you'll be using my recommendation is that during the study do not eat sugar as you're studying eat it on your breaks but not during make sure you actually get some good snacks as well but all that's actually part of the good plan that you need then of course every day commit and make sure that the goals that you have towards every single study session you may find out that you can only learn about one topic or maybe two topics but make sure you commit and make sure you actually get to the end of those topics as you do to and that you're working along the official exam objective points that you have okay now once you've gotten to that point once you take the initial assessment like in step number two that i'm showing you that will give you a baseline of how well that you've done or how poorly that you've done don't take that personally everybody has to start somewhere what you're hoping as you actually hit about 50 of the topics that you're covering is now as you go back through and you take another assessment that that score has increased in other words if you actually have stayed about the same it more than likely indicates that your study time is not as effective as it needs to be that means you need to buckle down a little bit more and go over that same fifty percent again before you proceed okay now if you actually have continued to show progress between the first time you took the assessment let's say you scored a 35 on the first assessment the second assessment you now scored a 65 70 percent that's what you're hoping for okay somewhere along another any type of improvement keep proceeding on when you're not showing improvement go back and re-study the sections which you haven't shown any improvement on then of course at the end when you actually have hit towards the end of those exam objectives and goals take the assessment again and you should have the majority of those questions answered by looking at it the first time okay and that will show you that your progress is actually continuing on and then of course the days before your exam you'll go ahead and do a final review as well now let's talk about this idea of the assessment which is actually very key and of course as much as you can especially if your particular exam requires some hands-on training to do just like a cisco certification well you can always find different things all across the internet here but you can always go to it pro tv as well now with itpro tv and some of the subscriptions that you have access to you not only have access to the course that you need for more training material but notice here is the idea of the assessment test so i can select practice tests and ccna and when i do so i can launch that practice test from there you actually see that you can actually do it multiple times if you choose to but what you want to do is you want to take it in whatever they call the test taking mode okay and that is they're going to actually try and treat it exactly like an exam does you're not getting the answers immediately afterwards take it as an assessment that way okay get about 50 percent through come back through launch the practice exam again say that you want to take the test taking exam mode or whatever the terminology is there make sure you do that and show that you actually have increased in that picker percentage as well and do that one more time before the very end now once you actually do that in each study in between you want to go back to your course and then when it calls for it also you have the ability to take advantage of different study labs that are also out there and these are even though we call them virtual labs well for the cisco labs our lab vendor partner actually has real cisco equipment that you can work on and these are covering well the exam objectives themselves i'm not going to tell you they match up exactly with what we have in our library but they will help you out where you can actually launch per module and that way you'll actually also have study lab guides that will help you out if you want to another as a guided lab if you choose to or sometimes you can actually freeform it as you actually go along and learn about the different technologies as well so all that is a single ready source and available material for you as you actually continue to practice now every certification vendor may actually do things a little bit differently but here using this example hopefully that's giving you a little bit of confidence and also helped you out as i should get ready to study for your certification exam so take advantage of that and also of course if you actually use it pro tv we'll see you there in our library

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Id: gyszjNKMuDs

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021