plan is scheduling your study time, and making that study time count.
You've scheduled your exam you've created a document to track your
study time you've planned exactly when you're going to study. Now the
plan must be carrie
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What exceptions do I mean? Cell phones. Televisions. IPods.
Significant others. The list can go on and on.
It's one thing to have a plan, and an important thing now you've got
to make sure you carry it out to its fullest potential. That's easy to
say until you're studying and a friend calls, or you remember that TV
show you wanted to watch is on tonight, or you start surfing the Web
for Cisco information and end up playing a game.
You MUST make these small sacrifices in order to achieve your main
goal, the CCNA. Any worthwhile accomplishment requires some small
sacrifice.
TV will be there when you're done studying. Your significant other
will be there when you're done studying. And believe it or not, people
once existed without cell phones! Turn the phone off. Turn your
instant messenger service off. Turn your text pager off. Despite what
we think, the world can do without communicating with us for 90
minutes. Remember, it's better to have 90 minutes of great study than
180 minutes of constantly interrupted study. Studies show that while a
single phone call causes an 11-minute interruption on average, it
takes well over 20 minutes to get back to what you were doing with the
proper mental focus. This is true at the office and at your home!
How To Spend Your Study Time CCNA candidates generally spend their
time split between book study, practice exams, and lab time on real
Cisco equipment. The best study is done by a combination of these, not
by overly relying on one. Let's take a look at each method.
Book study - I've never understood why some people (usually the trolls
we were talking about earlier) talk about book study like it's a bad
thing. "You can't learn about technology from books." What a load of
manure. You have to learn the theory before you can understand how a
router or switch operates. The best way to learn the theory is to read
a good book.
At the CCNA level, you doubtless know that you have dozens of choices
when it comes to books. Some of the better-known books really do gloss
over some important topics, such as binary math and subnetting. Make
sure to pick a book or books that go beyond just explaining the theory
and that give you a lot of explanation of router configs and
real-world examples as well.
Practice Exams: Practice exams are good in moderation, but don't use
them as your main focus of study. Occasionally, I'm asked for study
tips by candidates who have taken the exam a few times and not passed
yet. I ask them what they're doing to prepare, and they give a list of
companies they bought practice exams from. (You see a lot of this on
Internet forums as well.)
Don't fall into this trap. Practice exams are fine if used as a
readiness check, but some candidates just take them over and over
again, which renders them basically useless.
On top of that, some of them cost hundreds of dollars. That's money
you'd be much better off spending on Cisco equipment to practice on.
Again, I'm not against practice exams as a supplement to your studies.
Just don't make them the main focus of your study. Taking practice
exams over and over and hoping the exam will be just like the practice
exam is a recipe for disaster. As I tell my students, when you're in
front of a rack of routers and switches during a job interview (or at
2AM when you've been called in to fix a problem), the correct answer
is not "D". You've got to know what to do.
And how do you learn these skills? Funny you should ask.... Lab Time
On Real Cisco Equipment. Again, speaking from experience: This is the
most important part of getting your CCNA, succeeding on the job, and
going on to get your CCNP.
Getting hands-on experience is critical to developing your networking
skills, especially your troubleshooting skills. Although simulators
are better than they used to be, they're still not Cisco routers, and
they never will be.
You do your best learning not only when you're configuring your
routers, but when you screw something up.
That's so important, I want to repeat it - loudly: You do your best
learning when you screw something up. Why? Because then you have to
fix it that's how you develop your troubleshooting skills. You can
read about all the debug and show commands in the world, but you don't
really understand how they work until you're figuring out why your
Frame Relay connection isn't working, or your RIP configuration isn't
working.
This is true at every level of the Cisco Learning Pyramid. I can show
you the show ip protocols output or what you get when you run debug ip
rip, and you might remember it for a little while. But when you use it
to troubleshoot a lab configuration, you WILL remember it.
Putting your own practice lab together will also help get you over
what I call "simulator question anxiety". If you spend any time on
CCNA Internet forums, you'll see discussion after discussion about
these exam questions. To a certain point, this discussion is
justified. The simulator questions carry more weight on your exam than
any other question while you can earn partial credit on them, you've
got to get them right or you will most likely fail the exam.
There's no reason to be anxious about them if you're prepared. You
don't want to be the person who walks into the testing room that's
scared to have to create a VLAN or an access list you want to be the
person who walks into the testing room confident of their ability to
perform any CCNA task. The best way to be that confident is to know
you've done it - on real Cisco equipment.
There are several vendors that sell routers and switches on ebay most
of them sell CCNA and CCNP kits that include all the cables and
transceivers that you'll need as well. (And how is a simulator going
to help you learn about cables and transceivers? ) Keep in mind that
you can always sell the equipment after you're done with the CCNA, or
you can add a little equipment to it to go after your CCNP.
Whichever of these methods you use (and I hope you'll use all of
them), make sure to keep them in balance with each other. Don't depend
too much on just one.
On the topic of learning how to troubleshoot… as you run labs on your
Cisco equipment, you'll run into questions or problems that you don't
know the answer to yet. Get used to using Google (or your favorite
search engine) to find the answer to these problems - but try to
figure it our yourself first!
There's nothing wrong with asking questions of someone else if you're
not able to find the answer yourself. Trying to find the answer
yourself is another important troubleshooting skill you need to start
developing today. Don't be one of these people who posts a simple
question on a forum without trying to find the answer on your own.
Besides, you get more satisfaction and build more confidence when you
determine the answer yourself.
About the Author:
Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage
(www.thebryantadvan tage.com) , home of FREE CCNA and CCNP tutorials and
daily exam questions, as well as The Ultimate CCNA and CCNP Study
Packages.
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