Learning Opportunities - Training

As I’m in the home stretch of review for the CCNP ROUTE exam, I have had the good fortune of learning the material through several different formats, listed here:

1. Cisco Press ROUTE 642-902 Official Certification Guide (OCG)
2. Global Knowledge 5-day course CCNP ROUTE 642-902
3. Boson ROUTE Bootcamp (½-week) on 642-902
4. Boson ROUTE Bootcamp (½-week) on 300-101
5. Cisco Press ROUTE 300-101 OCG
6. Various YouTube INE videos on CCNP topics
7. Boson Exsim-Max Practice Exams

(If you want to know the history for all of these items, look me up at Cisco Live sometime and I’ll be happy to tell you! Neither I nor my employer paid for all of that…:)

With all these different methods of learning the material, one really has to wonder: what is the best way to learn the material?  And, believe it or not, this is a separate question: what is the best way to learn the material to pass the exam?  

Having gone through all of these methods (over the past year or so), I have gained some insight into the value for each method and hopefully that will help you on your journey.

Of course, everyone learns differently and you need to figure out the best method that works for you.  And, yes, yes… TL;DR at the bottom…

Classroom Environments

Instructor-led classes at a training facility are expensive!  It’s hard to see how anyone outside of employment funded training could ever afford this option.  However, if you can get approval, instructor-led training can provide three major benefits that nothing else can:

1. Isolation!  You get up to a week of distraction-free, away-from-work and away-from home time to really focus on learning the topics. 
2. Instructors!  An excellent instructor not only brings unique insight to the material but experience from previous classes and tests.  Many of these guys are real tinkerers, explorers, and nerds/geeks playing with the knobs to see what breaks.  They bring back those experiences to fill in the gaps between the textbook explanation and the software implementation. 
3. Peers! Meeting and sharing battle stories with colleagues from around the region or country is time well spent.  It’s probably doesn’t enhance your education of the topic at hand but it will definitely benefit you on the job.

Obviously, each of those benefits can be hit or miss.  Isolation is a function of your job and your discipline. Twitter and email are not study tools, just saying. The company paying $4000 for training but leaving you on-call for the week is not wise or helpful.

Instructor quality also varies.  I’ve had an awesome instructor for both Boson bootcamps, for many Cisco campus training events, and for many Red Hat certification classes.  My other training experience has been less than stellar though.  

Oddly enough though, peer engagement in my experience has been the most reliable.  Most classes I’ve taken have had at least 2 or 3 peers of high quality and good conversation, especially in classes that have decent size (15 students).  While every engineer loves to pull out the “you won’t believe this” scenario, a good lunch or dinner conversation is worth the money for the course… especially if you can rope in the instructor.

Self-Study/Certification Guides

This area varies greatly by “discipline” - Linux/systems certifications don’t really have a large supply of study materials out there in print.  At every Red Hat course I’ve taken, I’ve made the case for Red Hat to publish a guide or simply sell the course’s manual.  No dice.  Couple that with a lack of “RedHat Press” publications, your options are limited to the official product manuals – which by the way are very well done.  Most though are not about theory and principles but instead about implementing and doing.

In the networking space, there is a huge publishing space led by Cisco Press.  Having walked the path from CCNA to CCNP SWITCH and now CCNP ROUTE, I’ve not found a badly written guide yet. Only one OCG comes to mind that I found to be insufficient for exam preparation - CCNP SWITCH 642-813 OCG.  Fortunately, I stumbled across a copy of the Foundation Learning Guide (FLG) for SWITCH 642-813.  It’s hard to believe but I learned almost as much from the FLG as I did from the OCG. With both books digested, the exam was a more pleasurable experience (and outcome)!

The important thing here is - while reading study guides is time intensive compared to other consumption models (like video) - most of the Cisco Press guides are dense with information.  There’s a level of detail relative to the testing level (CCNA vs CCNP, e.g.) that is hard to cram into 1 hour video segments.  Even the best networking training classes did not provide the same amount of content that the corresponding guide provided. 

I must confess two things though - (1) I come from a systems background so I’ve only done networking about 5 years, compared to 10+ in systems.  I found the comprehensive detail and depth extraordinarily important to supplement my experience gap.  (2)  I also come from a deep science background and reading/digesting texts is right in my wheelhouse.  I can spend two straight hours and just soak it all up (as long as the laptop/TV are off!).  Reading, note taking, highlighting, and summarizing/aggregating key facts are old school but work very well for me.

Exam Simulation Software

If you are taking a Cisco certification exam, you are either a certified fool or a certified genius if you take the exam without using an exam simulation software package.  CCIEs get a pass because there really isn’t any exam simulation software… that’s the whole point of “expert”.  The Cisco certification exams are different.  Everyone who has taken one can certify (#RimShot) that there’s a “Cisco-ese” language and question structure that is fairly different from any multiple choice exam you have taken before.

If, for no other reason, the simulation software provides you with an exam format and question content similar to the actual exams. You will be very surprised at the number of questions that you will swear have more than one right answer.  Or the questions that look so obvious but you get wrong because the wording or scenario was set up just different enough to require another choice.

The best part about the simulation software is instant feedback on your answer and explanation of the choices presented.  On the official exam, you obviously won’t get any sort of detailed information to help you understand why you scored low in a given area.  You simply get a percentage for the major topic area - for example, the results would say “VPN Technologies - 65%”.   THAT’S NOT REAL HELPFUL.  Did you suck on DMVPN? Not know your butt from a GRE tunnel? 

On the exam simulation software (in study mode, at least), you learn exactly what are the right choices, get a break down of what the question is asking, and explanations of what each choice really does and why (or why not) is correctly answers the question.

TL;DR

As you might surmise from my setup (two questions) and my assessments, IMO there are methods and venues that work best for “getting better in your daily tasks and projects” and others that work best for “passing the exam”.  

Quite frankly, you should do all of them  no matter what your career goals happen to be.  All three of the tools above provide vital and unique training techniques to making you better at your job.  But, if you have a life or an intense job or have a imposed timeline, you need to make the best use of your time for the urgent need right now.  

With that in mind, in summation, I found that classes are great ways to learn the craft and apply them in your day-to-day life.  Instructors as I said make ALL the difference and then some. Figuring out which ones you are getting can be impossible but you should definitely do a lot of homework to shop around.

However, if you want to pass a Cisco certification exam, you better have the OCG or the Foundation Learning Guide and exam simulation software.  Many years of experience on the job  might get you past the “Associate” level exams but the “Professional” exams have too much material in scope to go in cold.

As a corollary to the “good instructors matter” mantra, one should never ever discount knowledgable peers who are willing to mentor you.  They are a godsend for on-the-job training and also provide valuable test taking strategies on certification exams.