My Successful Strategies of Passing Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching

Friday, 13, 5:45 a.m.... after my ccie routing and exchange lab attempt yesterday, I am still excited/anxiety and still in bed after one night. I rubbed my eyes, picked up my phone and saw a message that my results were posted on Cisco’s website.

I jumped out of bed and rushed to the living room laptop faster than Usain Bolt to see the results. My hands trembled when I opened the browser and logged on to Cisco.com.

I can’t believe what I see. The word “pass” is staring at me. CCIE number is staring at me. After countless hours of reading, learning, experiment, frustration, and excitement, it finally came to an end!

As you are reading this article, my guess is that you also want CCIE RS certification. I want to share with you how it started, what I prepared myself, what my research and laboratory was like. It begins with a dream.

As early as 2018 / 2019, I was a CCSI (Cisco Certified Systems Lecturer), teaching CCNA / CCNP R&S courses. It is important to have confidence in the classroom and know what you are doing because you don’t want students to know more about the situation than the teacher. Having the highest level of recognition increases your credibility, and once you have completed the CCIE R / S material, you will see most of the things you can do using a router or switch.

For me, pursuing CCIE is not what I should do, but now I will do it! Once the idea of CCIE came to my mind, it began to grow until I couldn’t stop thinking about it

So why does it take so long to get the certification? As I write this, it took me four to five years to turn the idea of becoming a CCIE into reality. Let me tell you why it took so long.

There’s always something…

One of the difficulties with CCIE is that it needs to cover a lot of materials and take a lot of time to complete. There are no shortcuts, you need to work hard to achieve your goal. I passed my CCIE on September 13, 2018, and completed the experiment on December 12, 2018, with three months of full-time study between these two days, working 6 days a week and 8 to 10 hours a day.

In these three months, I only do laboratories, laboratories, and even more laboratories. In the past few years, I have spent a lot of time reading all the different CCIE books. I’m lucky to be able to study full-time. If you have to do this next to a full-time job, you’ll have to do everything on weekends and nights.

This means that you may have to give up a full year of free time and spend all your time preparing for CCIE.

It’s the biggest problem for me because there’s always something you want/must do. For me, there are teaching courses, interesting projects, watching cool movies, interesting things with friends/family and so on.

If you want to go through the CCIE lab through my # 1 suggestion, I’ll give you the following: I’m not going to do that, but now. Get your credit card and book your seat. I wrote my CCIE in 2010, but my mistake was not to pay the experiment immediately. So, I’ll study hard for a few weeks and then take a few months. The CCIE I wrote has expired and I have to do it again. If you do not book the exam and experiment as soon as possible, it will always retain some "Commitment" that will never happen. Once you pay it, it will become clear, and your brain will change

For me, CCIE suddenly wasn’t something I would do some time but it became very clear…I had to get rid of all distractions because.

12 December 2018 was judgment day!

You need to figure out how bad you want to be a CCIE. Can you commit this and spend all your spare time learning and doing the experiment for a long time? Spend less time with your spouse, friends, and family? Stop doing all the interesting things you like to do?

If so…keep reading!

Nothing can stop you if you want to be CCIE. good! Now you need a battle plan to conquer as the enemy of the laboratory. You can easily spend a few days reading about the CCIE policy, but it’s very simplified that this is what you should do:

Get support from your spouse, boss, friends, and family.

Book the CCIE written exam ASAP.

After passing the CCIE written exam, book your lab ASAP.

Buy all the required CCIE books, take a look at my CCIE book reading list.

Buy CCIE training material from one of the vendors (I’ll tell you about it in a bit).

Study, study, study.

Pass the lab.

Get support

Before you get to the technical content, you should get the support of the close people and discuss the CCIE exam with them, especially if they’ve never heard before. Most people are used to exams in only a few days or a few weeks, that’s all. Because you’re working on CCIE for a long time, everyone around you should understand this and support you.

Talk to your spouse and make sure they understand that you will spend a lot of time looking at the square and circular charts behind your computer and typing mumbo jumbo. on the terminal screen Make CCIE a goal, not only for yourself but also for you or your family. Once you pass the lab, your career may move forward quickly, so make sure you’re all on the same team.

See if your boss can give you extra time to prepare. Make sure that he/ she understands that this is not just a personal goal, but it can be an advantage in the company’s own CCIE. Additional time is particularly important in the final preparation of the laboratory test.

Another strongly recommended form of support is to have a research partner. Just make sure he/she is as loyal as you and that you two are at the same level

I don’t have a boss, but I talked to my girlfriend about it and explained that I needed about three months of full-time study. She supported me when I locked myself in a Cisco cave.

Book the CCIE RS written exam

As I explained before, there are always some in between. Get one of the CCIE books there, study and pass the exam. This is what you have to do so that you can focus on your real goals. CCIE Laboratory.

CCIE Books

You can find the books that I read in my CCIE Book Reading List post that I created earlier.

CCIE Training Material

This is an important step in your preparation. When you’re reading, you can read books and set up your own lab, but what you really need is a complete package. There are many vendors to sell the complete CCIE R & S self-study package. I used the SPOTO workbook, so let me explain what their workbooks are.

There are 4 workbooks:

Volume 1: Advanced Technology Labs

Volume 2: Full-Scale Practice Labs

Volume 3: Advanced Foundation Labs

Volume 4: Advanced Troubleshooting

The first workbook has a lab, you focus on only one topic at a time, and you will see everything. OSPF, EIGRP,BGP,MPLS, etc. Everything comes from the CCIE blueprint. Volume 2 has 20 laboratories, similar to real laboratories.

Volume 3 is about speed, which can help you configure the second and third layers of the real lab as quickly as possible. The fourth volume has a troubleshooting lab. These are pre-configured networks with errors, so you can be a better troubleshooting tool.

The advantage of a complete training package is that you don’t have to waste time thinking about laboratories and building network topologies. Most of these vendors provide you with complete packaging, and you can use rack rentals, so you don’t have to worry about any hardware. Personally, I wasted a lot of time trying to use GNS3 or real hardware. I think it’s best to use rack rental so that you can spend 100% of your time studying.

This is where the real work starts…there are many different study plans but I’ll tell you what I did.

As early as 2018, when I started to study, the first thing I did was to book a CCIE pen and read and read the books I found on a different CIE reading list. I will read a book at a time and then create some laboratories for myself to try something I read in the book. I do this in order to make sure that I fully understand everything. I also created the thinking guide and saved a lot of command/ configuration examples in Notepad, and you need to remember a lot, so you need to write down what you’ve learned.

Between 2018 and 2019, I started to study INE.com materials and spent weeks doing volume 1 and 2 experiments, and then I was distracted from work again/other things to do. I passed my CCIE again on September 12, 2013, and I immediately paid for the lab seat on December 12, 2018 (the last seat I could get at the end of December). I’ve been studying Monday from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Monday and that’s my schedule.

First 5 – 6 weeks I only did INE volume 1.

20 days doing full-scale labs from INE volume 2.

A week or so troubleshooting INE volume 4 labs.

A week building up my speed with INE volume 3 labs.

The remaining weeks I spent redoing full-scale labs from INE volume 2 and repeating some mini labs that I had a hard time memorizing.

For me, this worked very well. I liked the idea of starting with one workbook and finishing it before I moved to the next one. The last 2 weeks before the lab I dream about BGP, OSPF and the lab exam every day.

During my three months of full-time study, these colored pens were my best friends, and I used them to map all these networks. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take them to the lab.

The Lab

The day before the lab, I didn’t do anything except for relaxing and playing. It’s a perfect day if you like to exercise. It’s best to save your mental energy for the exam, and you won’t have any effect on this day.

I woke up at 7: 00 in the morning for breakfast and had enough food, so I wouldn’t feel hungry before lunch. The Cisco reception began at 8:30 in the morning, but I was there at 8: 00 in the morning, so I walked around the building for a while. I don’t feel anxious that some of the other candidates are here. We had a little talk about CCIE before the reception began.

At the reception, you have to register, you get some stickers, you’re here to take the CCIE exam. We have to wait for the examiners to appear and the silence is fatal. Everyone is nervous/ anxious, so no one is talking too much. Finally, the examiners appeared, and we went to the CCIE lab.

The laboratory is very good. There is plenty of space between you and other candidates. You have your own desk, 24-inch monitor, some paper and some pencils. The quality of pencils is so bad that it is difficult for me to draw with them, but I still haven’t used much. I’m not sure what kind of keyboard I have, but I think it’s Logit MK200 or something like that.

Next to the lab is another room with equipment, and you will hear some slight background noise. You may want to bring a sweater or something, because if you sit still all day, you may catch a cold. The invigilator explained some rules to us during the exam.

There are a coffee maker and some toilets next to the lab, and whenever we want to use one of them, we can do so. There is no need to ask the invigilator to allow them to leave your desk. The computer you use has a web browser, so you can use the support part of (DocCD), and it has putty, so you can connect to your lab. You can usually right-click in Putty to paste something, but they change it so that when you have to choose paste, you can get a small pop-up screen. I don’t mind this, but you might want to try it at home.

Troubleshooting section

I made version 4 of the lab, so it started with two hours of troubleshooting. It takes a few minutes to get used to the computer and overcome the feeling of "I’m finally here it's time to dance." once I relax a little, I start looking at tickets and topologies. I won’t elaborate on the topology or tickets, but it took me about 30 minutes to solve half of the problems that felt good. I spent an hour on the remaining tickets and verified my work, and then clicked the "end session" button because I felt like I had solved all of these problems. It’s cool that you can spend the rest of your time in the configuration section.

Configuration section

After the troubleshooting section, I feel very self-confident, as I have solved all the tickets (at least this is my idea). If you think you’re performing poorly in troubleshooting, the processing of the configuration section in the next six hours will be a problem.

I started to take 10 to 15 minutes to view the task and topology and see if I can combine something or if there is any trap. There are a lot of things to configure, and time management is a huge deal. When I started to configure things, I didn’t even touch the console of any device...

I did everything in the notepad. Until now, you should be able to dream of all the commands, so I created the whole part in Notepad and then pasted them on the device. When I enter an error, I’ll fix it in Notepad, and then paste everything back to the device.

After 3 hours of configuration, I was done but still had to verify everything. I spent the remaining 3 hours (I had 30 minutes extra that I saved from the troubleshooting section) to read each and every task…line-by-line and verify the output on my devices with show commands.

Imagine you’re using a fine hair comb. Don’t think that something is right and check everything. I found some stupid mistakes and fixed them, and I believe this is the key to my success. This is the only time I check DocCD to verify that I’m not sure about 2 little things.

About 20 minutes before the end of the meeting, I finished and clicked the "End Session" button. I feel good, but I’m glad it’s over. After 8 hours of uninterrupted focus, you’ll be tired, so I left the building, drove, with some nice background music to go home.

Conclusion

So what can I say for a long journey? First of all... I really like it! I’ve never learned so long, and once you’ve finished it, it feels great! I’ve learned a lot about discipline by doing the experiment day after day and spending a lot of time in it. I can fully understand that if anyone does not want to do this again, I personally think that I will do another CCIE in the future

The troubleshooting section is really good, I think it’s really at the expert level to test you, you have enough time to get the tickets. For two reasons, I do not like to configure the system:

The amount of configuration required: Sometimes I feel that the test is about typing speed and the ability to quickly generate the configuration of all devices using Notepad. I’d rather see a higher degree of difficulty and need more time to think. The lab should be like a chess game, not an endurance race.

Scoring system: the way of scoring in the exam is very poor. It’s bad if you ask me. You only get the whole part of the score, so if you get the right part, you can get 100% of the score. If you miss a small project, then you get 0 points. Imagine having a BGP section with 15 tasks, and if you try to configure 14 tasks correctly but mess with 1, you get 0 points. There is no part of the work. It is rated in such a way that you fail.

The CCIE laboratory test should check if you are an expert. If you provide a score for each of the correctly configured tasks, you can check that the problem is understood and granted. It’s strange to shoot down someone because they have an "only" of up to 99.99%.

In any case, I hope you like this article of my CCIE adventure and encourage your own CCIE tour. If you have any questions, please make a comment at any time! Remember, because of the CCIE NDA, I can’t answer any (technical) questions about the exam.