Many of you commented or emailed me to pass on your congratulations in regards to my recent success in passing my Service Provider CCIE exam and a lot of you also asked if I could write an article about how I manage(d) my work, study, and family time while preparing for the exam. Things have slowed down enough where I feel as though as I could do this article justice so I thought it was time to write it. I want to say upfront that this post will not in any way be technical in nature, nor am I attempting to say that this is the de-facto methodology that you should use when you yourself prepare for an exam. This is the methodology that works best for me and my family and after using it to help us get through 3 CCIE exams I feel it works well for us (us being my family and I).

One of if not the biggest contributing factors to my success has been my wife, whom realizes that networking is my career not my job. Those of you who feel the same way or has a spouse that feels the same way as well will understand what I mean by that statement and she knows that with each passing CCIE the rewards that accompany it are great like recognition, exposure, maybe advancement at work and most of all some kind of monetary reward. These are just a few of the rewards someone may receive by passing an exam and each person sits an exam for different reasons. I passed my first CCIE (Routing/Switching) back in September of 2000 and at the time I sat the exam for the obvious reasons but the most important to me at the time were money and advancement. My wife was pregnant with our son (our first child) when I started preparing for that exam back almost 10 years ago and we learned how to prepare for the CCIE by trial and error. Back then there was no such thing as a study guide, proctor guide or Class on Demands like there is today. Most of the CCIE training partners were not in existence yet and study material was extremely scarce…We studied using a core set of training material that every CCIE candidate back then had to have, the 3 books that were a must were:

1)      Cisco Certifications - by Bruce Caslow (and this was the 1st edition)

2)      Routing TCP/IP - by Jeff Doyle (again this was the 1st edition)

3)      Internet Routing Architectures - by Sam Halabi (yes this too was the 1st edition)

I am willing to bet that these 3 books have been on the shelves of at least 95% of all minted CCIE’s in some edition or the other, back then each of those books were only in first edition print. Companies like IPexpert, InternetworkExpert, ieMentor and others were not around…I think if memory serves me correctly the only certification vendor around back then was ccbootcamp and I think their workbook was in like revision 1 or 2 (Brad correct me if I’m wrong there). Your only other study partner was a list known as Groupstudy and anyone who was anyone in networking had/has to be a member of Groupstudy. So as opposed to today where I have a large selection of excellent partners to pick and choose from when deciding on which Service Provider workbook to purchase, back then we didn’t have those luxuries so you spent as much time studying as you did creating your own scenarios’ to study or you had someone else like a study partner create a scenario for you, maybe some real world scenario they experienced earlier that week or month during a customer install and you also spent a lot of time testing sample configurations from CCO.

I have lived and continue to live with one principle understanding as it relates to balancing work and family time and as I began to study for my 1st exam and make Cisco my career I recognized quickly that I would not ever, ever let work life overshadow my family life. I work to live, I do not live to work and as much as I love Cisco and this field in general, I would walk away in a split second if it ever jeopardized my family relationship. So with that in mind I set out to figure out to get through the lab and at the same time remain married J. I knew that I would have to figure 3 things out:

1)    How do I manage time with my wife, my son whom had been born during this journey and friends as well as manage to still get a solid 4 hours time per day. 4 hours was a minimum, if days and schedules permitted me more then I was going to take it. So I needed to learn when to study

2)    I also knew that I needed to learn how to study and this was broken down into 2 separate subsections. First should I just jump on the racks and figure out how to make some technology work or should I get a deep understanding of the fundamental operations of a certain technology then move to applying what I learned in theory into practice on the racks. I decided on the latter and as such the second portion of learning how to study was deciding on the appropriate breakdown of theoretical learning and practical application of theory. Was a 50-50 breakdown the best or maybe a 70-30 or what about a 4—60?

3)    Finally, I knew that in order to maximize my learning I had to learn what to study. Cisco publishes the blueprints to each lab which is like a roadmap. They tell you which topics you can expect to see on the lab but you have to connect the waypoints. I figured that there was going to be core components of the lab, for instance like in the R/S lab I figured I would see most of if not all of the routing protocols supported by Cisco. So I knew that better know those components cold so that I would not waste time with the basic turn up of the core components. I did the same for the SP lab; I figured I would see MPLS in the SP lab right? So why waste time with having to look up the basics. 

So in regards to item number 1, what I decided was that if I were to wake a few hours earlier, I could get some quality study time in without taking time away from the family, not to mention it’s pretty quiet that early in the morning so the study time that I did get was quality study time with no interference from work or family. So I set my alarm for 4:30am everyday so that I could wake and have a couple of quality hours either in the books, on the racks or online reading on CCO. This is a practice that I still follow today, CCIE exam or not, You don’t want to know what my energy drink bill runs per month either ;-). Following this methodology does not take time away from the family and gives me quality study time as well. I would also take time late at night after my son went down for the night (and now days my daughter as well) and after I spent time with my wife and recap what I learned early that day. I would devote no more than 45 minutes to this practice but it helped me to accelerate and reinforce the learning points that I needed to cram into my brain for the lab.

After developing my study schedule, I set out to learn how to study in a manner that would be most effective and maximize the time that I set aside for learning. I knew that I could jump right onto the equipment and begin hammering away and eventually I may understand that command that was needed to enable the technology to operate according to the stated requirement but was that the best most effective use of my time? Well knowing that networking was my career, I decided that that most likely was the wrong thing to do from a career standpoint and besides I just didn’t want to be a CCIE for sake of being a CCIE. If I was going to be called an expert then I wanted to be just that, an expert. It still amazes me today when I visit with customers or partners alike and they have their own CCIE in the meetings yet that person has no true fundamental understanding of the operation of technology yet they know how to enable it on the router… It’s one thing to know how to type in ‘mpls ldp session protection’ into the parser, it’s another to understand the operation of the command you just entered!! So with those things in mind to told myself that I needed/wanted to have a strong base understanding of the fundamental operation of the technologies covered…So I read every book I get my hands on and I read all the configuration documentation available on CCO for whatever version code was running on the equipment in the lab….yep, that’s right. I read completely through 12.2 & 12.4 configuration guides on CCO and only after having a strong understanding of the technologies theoretical operation did I get on the equipment.

Finally but not least significant, was that I told myself based on the blueprint for the exam and knowing that the lab is a point vs. time game that I was not going to waste time having to refer to the doc cd for basic and medium complex configs. So in regards to the topics covered in the blueprint, I made a word document that had sample configs of what I considered to be the core topics and I studied those topics until I knew how to enable a certain feature or technology in my without having to use the ? or the doc cd. I literally went out to CCO and found whatever topic it was and copied the sample configs to my word doc and studied them over and over and over…Doing this gave me a bunch of extra time in the lab because I did not have to refer to the doc cd for much at all. 

One last thing that I did also which I failed to mention was that during my time studying and practicing for the exam, I also lived life. I would take a day or two off and me and the family would go out for dinner or to a movie, a ballgame or anywhere other than a rack of equipment. I would turn off the study nob and I would focus on them, after all they were the main reason I was studying to begin with.I know a lot of people who lock themselves in the lab and don’t come out until it’s over. I’m not that kind of person, life goes on and if you set the CCIE as your goal, stay positive and committed you will get your number in due time.