Study For The Ccie

By Author: yvonne
Total Articles: 482
Comment this article

When you're studying for the CCIE Workbooks, you have to be able to come home from a tough day, go to your lab,

and study for hours, day, after day, for an average of 12-18 months. You give up on your home life, lose weekends, don't see your buddies, and so on. It's

hard - really hard, but you have to have the discipline to sit down, and get on with it. This stands to you afterwards, for example, before I did my CCIE, I

couldn't work at home - I got nothing done. Now I work at home 4 days a week and get twice as much done as when I go into the office.
Documentation and Manuals

The use of the DocCD (sorry, I'm old fashioned). I don't remember every timer default, or how to configure every feature of the IOS. But I can find out

pretty damned quick, and I never use google. You have to know the documentation site backwards to do the lab. During preparation, you learn how to navigate

the documentation site quickly and effectively, and learn where everything is. In the real world, this is really useful every single day. No more searching ...
...

google and hoping the answer isn't on experts-exchange.
Attention to Details

You can't make mistakes in the CCIE lab. One little thing can cost you the exam (the way the marking works makes a mistake on the underlying infrastructure

mean that lots of questions which depend on it fail). So you have to be perfect every time. Personally, this was a bigger challenge than learning the IOS -

when I did mock labs it was the dumb mistakes that got me every time. You have to work on that to a point where your planning and coding is perfect every

time.

This is the big difference between the ccie routing and switching

lab and all other Cisco exams. It's not enough to know the theory. You need to be able to set up a really complex network, spot the problems, and

troubleshoot them quickly and effectively when the little trap that was left for you trips up your configuration. During your preparation, you spend hours

and hours every week setting up scenarios to fail, so you can troubleshoot them. This is invaluable.
Technique as powerful as knowledge

I would always recommend this process to anyone who hasn't done it, and wants to be the best engineer they can be to do the CCIE. Not because you learn lots

of cool features (although you do), and not because you'll get a better paid job (hopefully you will), but because it teaches you how to work better,

faster, and more reliable in the real world. This is why CCIE's are still so sought after.
One Last Point

Don't be tempted with the shallow promises of braindump sites. By giving yourself this ccie voice lab boot camp, you're not giving yourself the main learning experience, you're only passing the exam. When you're

interviewed, people will know. When you go to a job, you'll get found out.