Help me create a CCNA study plan

In My Humble Opinion
1

My boss is encouraging me to think about going for my CCNA (as of last Saturday, out of the five people in our department, one them doesn’t have the CCNA cert. Guess which one.). I like learning new things, especially new things that will get me more money come review time, so I agreed.

To be clear, this isn’t a ‘get it as quickly as possible or your job is in jeopardy’ kind of situation. Time is not really a factor as long as I make some kind of steady progress, and I dislike bootcamp style courses since the information retention factor tends to be low, at least for me.

I was able to get my hands on a copy of the Sybex CCNA Study Guide, which breaks the course into 14 chapters. I’m planning to work through it at the rate of one chapter a week, so as to give myself time to learn it properly and play around with the labs without cramming. This plan is obviously open to modification should I find the material either harder or easier than expected.

My question is, for those of you who’ve learned the CCNA outside of a bootcamp-type course, what’s a good point to stop and review previous subjects before moving on? The first pause would logically be between the introduction to generic networking-TCP/IP-subnetting, and the first dive into Cisco’s proprietary stuff, but after that? Where’s a good point to break it up conceptually? While we’re at it, is my chapter-a-week plan abysmally slow, or pie-in-the-sky fast, or just right?

If you want to tell me about studying for your CCNA, I’m into that too. :slight_smile:

2

I presume this isn’t completely new material for you?

It’s been a while since I did the CCNA, but unless they’ve changed things drastically, my guess is that you may want to go faster than 14 weeks. Cisco tests tend to be high on detail retention, so digging out material memorized 3 months back may be tough. I used the Cisco Press study guide for the CCNA, but at a higher pace. Then again, it was mostly known material for me.

Do you have access to some sort of lab hardware? In my experience, while simulators are nice, working with the real hardware lets you wander down paths not specifically foreseen in the simulators. (Perhaps the simulators are better these days.)

There are some pretty good forums on www.cisco.com, specific to certifications.

A very important thing: Trial runs with test exams. Cisco loves wording their questions in a very specific style, and having experience with that can make a huge difference.

3

It’s not totally new material, in theory, but my approach to these things so far has always been “learn it as I need it”, which means there are often surprising and large gaps in my basic knowledge. I do have access to cisco routers - they’re pretty much all we use for our customers, and the office is usually overflowing with them. In fact, the last two to take the exam had their own little lab set up in our area.