If you’ve come with me this far, thank you, and get ready to go a little further. If you hang out until the end, then hopefully there’ll be some good takeaways and advice.
So That’s What Failure Tastes Like
After my dismal showing at my first CCIE Lab attempt, I had to re-evaluate. It would have been nice to have been in that prestigious club of first-time passers (small as it is), but alas, it was not to be. From my first lab attempt, and the score report, I took away three major lessons:
- I wasn’t fast enough at configuring and I was making small mistakes. The lab isn’t so impossible that one can’t make any mistakes at all (as you will see on my second attempt), but every mistake adds up, and quickly.
- There were technologies that I ignored or did not study well because I have deployed them in production in the past, and thought I knew them well enough. This came back to seriously bite me in the ass, because the lab is not production, and things can be extremely different.
- I did not work hard enough at verifying solutions. The CCIE lab is designed to entrap you, to make you chase problems and waste time. It is possible to complete the entire exam and still fail utterly because you didn’t have time to go back and re-verify everything. The very smallest omissions or issues can lose points, and you’d best believe that most CCIE lab exams come down to just a few points between pass and fail.
I had to create a plan of attack to address these deficiencies. The first one, improving speed and accuracy, was just something that would take time. There was no silver bullet to address this. My friend Steve had come to RTP around this time for his first attempt at CCIE Security, and I remember talking with him about it (non-specific, non-NDA stuff) over NC barbecue. He said, “I just have to be faster. I know the technology, now I just need to drill it until I can do it without thinking. This is the hard part.” That stuck with me, because it’s true. In my opinion, knowing the technology isn’t everything. It’s more like this:
Knowledge of Technology: 65% (Lower than you probably thought)
Time Management: 15%
Strategy: 15%
Stress Management: 5%
Part of the strategy and time management is programming your brain and muscles to simply crank out the configuration. Save the documents for corner cases. Any configuration which is part of a core technology should be memorized and spat out within a minute. Any configuration which can be repeated should be stuck in a notepad along with the task number for easy reference. I can not stress this enough: A CCIE candidate has to be fast enough to not only finish a config lab within the time, but have extra time to go back through and verify the tasks. In practice, plan for the verification process to take an hour out of a five-hour lab, or 1/5th the total time. Any faster and you may not catch mistakes, and it’s unlikely that there will be much more time available than that. Of course, those are guidelines for planning. In practice, there are far too many variables to guarantee any timeline.
Rocky Montage Time
Okay, so the very first thing I did, the day after I got my failing grade, was to lab a certain technology that I absolutely bombed on. At incredible length. I *might* have gone a little crazy, in fact. I spent about four hours trying every possible configuration in layer 2 access and layer 3 access topologies. I debugged every device involved – the client, the switches, the routers. I correlated the debugs and changed things up to see what would happen. In short – I did what I should have done before my first attempt.
After I really felt like I understood that technology and every possible permutation I could see, I focused on adding it to my regular technology rotation. The two months between attempts, for me, was about addressing my shortcomings (of which only one was technology knowledge-based) and maintaining my progress. Any CCIE candidate will tell you that studying for the exam is like juggling oranges – it’s tough keeping all of it in your head and available at a moment’s notice. It’s taxing, and it requires near-constant labbing just to keep what you’ve already learned, as well as to keep your speed and strategy in muscle memory.
I not only needed to maintain, I needed to accelerate. I wasn’t fast enough, not by half. The largest disconnect between a candidate studying for the exam and a candidate who’s taken the exam is the understanding of how the day goes, and how the time must be managed. Before I took my first attempt, I was finishing full-scale labs within five hours and scoring fairly well. Time is time, right? If I can do it before the lab I should be able to do it in the lab…right? No, and this is why:
There is a limited amount of material out there. There are only so many full-scale lab topologies from so many providers. As a candidate, you need to lab far more than there are labs. It’s a guarantee that you WILL see the same topologies more than once. This will impact your studies, because you can really only see the same lab once, perhaps twice, before its secrets are laid bare. Once the lab has been solved, you can’t really un-solve it. You can use it as a time trial, to practice speed and refresh knowledge, but it’s no longer useful as a test. You will naturally get faster at it. This will not be (entirely) a result of the fact that you have become unexpectedly amazing.
Don’t worry, you’re still amazing. I believe in you and this little guy does too.
Which brings us to the next thing I did to try and address my shortcomings: I diversified. Before my first attempt, I had only used INE’s materials, specifically, their Advanced Technology workbook and the Graded Online Assessment. I decided to add the Cisco Expert-Level Training Labs (Cisco 360) to the mix. These labs were a bit hit and miss, but I found their general flow and setup to be somewhat closer to the real thing. More importantly, it covered the same technologies in a vastly different way, and I felt really good for having attacked the same material from another angle. I found blind spots I didn’t know that I had from only using one vendor. Because I was able to tackle a bunch of labs I hadn’t done before, it also gave me much-needed feedback on my speed/accuracy/strategy/time management as well. A large part of CCIE study is being able to recognize the difference between learning something, becoming proficient with it, and then simply crushing it into the ground, far past the point of proficiency and into the realm of absurdity. Because every lab can only give this feedback once or twice, gathering that feedback is so important.
I never got a chance to attend Narbik Kocharian’s CCIE bootcamp, and I never purchased his lab workbook, but I want to point out that EVERYONE I talked to who had attended his bootcamp and/or bought the workbook was happy with the money spent. Every. Single. Person.
The last thing that I did was to crack open my lab notebook, the one I’d left in my car on lab day and furiously populated immediately after I was out. I wasn’t exactly sure how valid/accurate it was, but I knew it was infinitely better than what I already knew about the lab. I spent time leafing through the notebook and built as much as I could in EVE. I couldn’t be sure how accurate it would be to the real thing, but I considered it time well spent. Yes, there were other lab topologies in the CCIE exam, but any new material (especially ACTUAL material I had seen) was gold. I did not share this (the notebook or the labs).
In fact, this part deserves special mention. In RouterGods, we often did study sessions together where other candidates would join a Google Hangout and share screens while labbing. Sometimes people worked on the same labs, sometimes it was just a shared experience that helped with accountability (Always Be Labbing!). After my first attempt, I could still join these study sessions, but if I was working on the lab that I built based on my exam notebook, I wouldn’t join the Hangout. I simply could not allow other candidates to see what I was working on; even if they didn’t know what it was, they might have guessed and this would be very much against the NDA.
So, to recap, after failing the first time, this is how I worked toward a second attempt:
- I labbed technology that I struggled with ad infinitum, then put it into my standard technology rotation.
- I diversified vendors, adding more labs to my rotation, and more importantly, gaining much-needed data on my actual performance.
- I built the lab topology I had seen (from memory and from my scribbled notes) along with as much of the tasks as I could remember (especially ones I struggled with) to try and figure them out.
For all of these things, I worked on accelerating the speed and accuracy with which I did them. I’m sorry to say there is no secret to this. The main suggestion to improve quality of life would be this: To achieve the zen-like flow of muscle memory and recall, it’s important to get as close as possible between your study environment and the real exam. The smallest things (right-click to paste vs. right click, then select paste) can damage your muscle memory and require your brain to slow down and manage it. If you want every edge in the real exam, train yourself to match the lab or know exactly which options you can change and how to do them quickly.
By late February I was eyeing exam dates. Being local to RTP allowed me to be more cavalier with scheduling. I noticed that the only lab dates were at the end of March and began to despair; any CCIE candidate nearing the end of the journey knows how hard it is to stay in ‘beast mode’ for any length of time. This is the ‘It’s one week before the lab, I need to lab every second, correct every mistake, and eat/sleep/dream the exam’ mode that candidates tend to reach before lab day. I wouldn’t last that long, the motor would just burn out if the accelerator was pressed for another month. Luckily for me, before I had booked a date for the end of March, one day opened up and I pounced on it: March 9.
My last post was a little long, so though I originally intended to wrap this up with this post, I have a lot to say about attempt #2 and a roll-up of all my advice/suggestions/etc throughout this series. Rather than try to shoehorn it all in, I’ll leave the best for last.
