Eman thank you very much for the opportunity to submit my own article to the CCIE Flyer. I wanted to talk about something that is targeted to those just starting out in the Cisco Career, but hopefully have that vision of becoming a CCIE someday.

Get the Big Picture
I’m not a huge fan of using practice questions in preparing to take your next Cisco Exam and I think a lot of people rely on them too heavily. When this happens you are trying too much to memorize the answers and not really understand what is going on. I also think that all the time you spend on practice questions could be spent more effectively in other areas that will help you better understand key topics to become a great networking administrator.

When you study for your CCNA Exam or any Cisco Exam you need to get the big picture. Not just memorize acronyms or commands that might be on the exam, but try and see how everything works together as a whole.

One of the things that I have realized when studying is that almost every single topic follows just about the same two patterns. And noticing these patterns can really help see and focus on what you have left to learn for your next exam.

Pattern #1
The First pattern is that there is always a static way of doing something and there usually is also a dynamic way of accomplishing the same task. The static way usually requires a lot of manual input which is what innovated the creating of the dynamic way. Which after the initial setup should pretty much run by itself.

Pattern #2
Almost every topic will have a Cisco Proprietary way and an Open Standard way of accomplishing something. The Cisco Proprietary way will not work with other vendors equipment. The Open Standard way will work across all vendors equipment and produce pretty much the same result.

Example
Here is one simple example of the two patterns when it comes to IP Routing. You can set up routes manually by adding them to the routing table. The dynamic way of accomplishing this same task with a lot less administrative overhead is to use a routing protocol. Cisco has its own proprietary version that it uses called EIGRP. The Open Standard routing protocol that accomplishes pretty much the same thing is OSPF.

What other topics follow this same pattern?

If you can realize these patterns when studying about any topic for you next Cisco exam it can really help you stop focusing so much on practice questions and trying to memorize answers. Take a step back, slow down, get out a blank sheet of paper and write down each of the main topics that you are studying. Then for each topic write out a summary of what the topic is, what is the Cisco proprietary version for doing this? What is the open standard way for doing this? How to I set it up statically and how can I do this Dynamically? And then go take the time to do it. Don’t just move on to the next topic, but make sure you put in the lab time to practice and practice. This will help you so much more than just answering practice questions for hours on end. Go build networks.

-Blake
www.NetworkingExamAcademy.com