How To Spend Study Time

To pass the CCNA exam, you´ve got to create a study plan. Part of that

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 carried out, without exception.



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.