This post should be the most useful to people planning for their own CCIE journey, and so I’ll take the most time to try and add good detail here.
After deciding to get my CCIE, I needed to determine what that meant; what it would realistically mean in terms of time commitment, buy-in from stakeholders in my life, and my own self-assessment of readiness to embark on such a journey.
The CCIE Journey Checklist
The first thing you need to do when deciding if the time is right to get your CCIE is to take a look at your life, honestly and without glossing over any important details. Ask yourself the following questions:
Do I have a stable job? Will that job support me in this goal? If so, how? Will they reduce my workload to allow the time to study? Will they assist me with study materials, bootcamps, travel, etc?
If the answer to any of the prior questions is “No”, consider whether you have the reserves (financial and temporal) to overcome the lack of support. If you don’t have the reserves, then my advice to you would be to fix that first in whatever way seems best. Talk to management, change jobs, make this part of any benefits you look for. Save money to have reserves. The CCIE journey is akin to climbing a tall mountain, step by step; if you get halfway up that mountain and run out of food, you won’t make it to the top and you will have wasted a lot of resources.
Once you feel comfortable that you have the financial and temporal support from your job, you need to look at your family situation. Ask yourselves the following questions:
Does anyone else rely on me for support? To what extent? If I were to need a lot of extra time to study, what would be the impact to that person or persons? Realistically, if I took another job and worked 25+ hours a week for a year or two, what would the impact be?
Seriously and honestly evaluate the answers. Just like needing the financial and temporal support to pursue the CCIE, you also need the ability to focus inward and study for a large amount of time, for an extended period of time. Don’t underestimate the amount of time and effort involved.Whether you have a significant other, children, and/or are some sort of caregiver, you need to make other people aware of the commitment; make no mistake, you are committing them to it as well.
If your situation isn’t right for this sort of commitment, consider putting off the start of your CCIE journey until things have changed. Once again, the worst possible scenario in this situation is to end up halfway up the mountain and have to abandon the journey. There is a saying among CCIE candidates:
You haven’t actually failed until you’ve given up.
People have a lot of reasons to give up, but it’s up to you to ensure you won’t fail before you even start.
The last thing you need to examine before starting the journey is yourself. It’s time to do the most difficult part: Have an honest conversation with yourself. You need to examine the topic list for the CCIE (knows as the blueprint) in detail and determine how you feel about the topics. If you’ve been a network engineer for years and have a lot of experience with OSPF, give yourself that credit when evaluating the blueprint. If you just passed your CCNP, have no real work experience, but want to get your CCIE while you are young and have no familial obligations, you need to understand that knowing CCNP topics is not the same as real-world experience.
This is the part where being honest with yourself is the most crucial, no matter your level of expertise. If you know how to configure OSPF but not the use case for why you need stub areas, that is a different level of OSPF knowledge than someone who designs OSPF networks. The blueprint may just say “OSPF”, but be honest about your real comfort level with the technology. It’s perfectly valid to study for the CCIE with no work experience, but understand that your journey will be harder than someone who’s used it for years. The blueprint cannot distinguish between levels of experience, that’s for you to do on your own.
If, after examining the blueprint and being honest about your comfort with the technologies, you find yourself lacking, make a plan to fix it. The CCIE will still be there a few years down the road, and it may be that the time you ‘waste’ getting experience will save you a lot more time when you’re ready to commit to getting the CCIE.
If you examine the blueprint and rate yourself honestly, and still want to proceed, then make a study plan. Many industry vendors offer materials and bootcamps. Decide what works best for you.
How I Checked the LIst
Because this post is supposed to be about my journey, let me go through this exercise myself to show you how I determined it was time.
As I mentioned before, I started with Cisco Advanced Services and they were very interested in helping people pursue their CCIE. My work load was reduced to about 70% and I was given access to materials with which to study.
I had a talk with my wife when it came time to start working on the CCIE. I set expectations about where I’d be most weekends, early mornings, and how long it was likely to take. I also explained it as best as I could to my children, because they are still at the age where they love to play with Daddy and notice when he’s gone.
I was brutally honest with myself about the blueprint. Here’s where my prior experience made a huge difference. I was actually at expert level on a few technologies already and had at least a working knowledge of most others (MPLS was missing, but BGP was not, as an example). I broke down the topics and assigned a generalized time to them to get first exposure (if needed), and so on.There was a lot of guess work here and so I overestimated a lot.
I also evaluated what the CCIE was likely to do for my career. By this point I had years of experience, and if I wanted to progress at Cisco, it was the logical next step. I can not stress this enough: Figure out how concrete the benefits are that the CCIE will get you. If it just seems like a worthwhile goal because you hear that CCIEs make a lot of money, you’re going to have a bad time. Understand exactly what your time, money and effort are purchasing and make sure the exchange rate makes sense. If you don’t, you’ll get halfway up that mountain and run out of energy to reach the top.
Update: Long after I spent my time getting my CCIE, I found a free Coursera course called Learning How to Learn by Dr. Barbara Oakley. She covers the science of learning and the techniques that make things stick better, faster, and retain longer. I cannot stress this enough: No matter where you are on your CCIE journey, I recommend you find time to interleave this course into your studies. Going through the course was a lesson in how to study for the CCIE. Tricks I thought were mine were well documented and science supported them, effort I spent trying to figure out how to retain and incorporate knowledge could have been mine for free. Unless your lab attempt is tomorrow, find time to go through this course. I promise the time invested will pay incredible dividends on your studies.
In my next post, I’ll cover my study plan for the CCIE Written and results of my first attempt.
