Hello fellow Networkers,
Good day and I trust and hope that all of you are in good health.
First of all I would like to thank Emmanuel Conde for giving me the opportunity to let the Cisco world know a little about me.
I have been in the Cisco scene for a little more than 5 years after earning my CCNA back in 2003 (I was 24 years old that time and a pretty rebellious teen too ;-)). During that time, my sole motivation was just to see if I could get a Cisco certification since I had a few Microsoft certifications that time including the MCSE and MCSA. I remembered that time that I did not had any equipment at work nor at home to practice on so I would spend a few hours each day during the CCNA training course just to get a ‘feel’ of how to do things. Now due to lack of constant practice and studying in addition to the critical situation of not having any Cisco equipment at work (since I am not exactly a network administrator that time), my knowledge and skills gained from the CCNA started to fade. I could not remember many things including RIP and IGRP.
In 2005 however, things started to change. I landed myself a job as a network engineer at a logistics company called Wilh. Wilhelmsen ASA (the interviewer just ask me to sell myself instead of asking me standard interview questions so I guess my crappy talk was good enough ;-)). From there I was given the task of looking after the regional network for South East Asia. Whoa … a real major task for me at that time! The office in Kuala Lumpur/KL (capital city of Malaysia which is where I am currently based) has already an intermediate setup (a Cisco 6513 Catalyst switch, a few 2600s and 3640s, a few PIXs and a handful of 2950s) so looking after not only KL but the rest of South East Asia seems very interesting indeed. This is where my journey back into the Cisco world would begin …
I begin to study Cisco again and having recertified my CCNA in May 2008 and passing the CCNP in August 2008, my interest and motivation in Cisco began to grow again until I considered trying for the ultimate in Cisco certifications, the intimidating CCIE and this will not be without a lot of challenges. Having married just recently means I have to balance my marriage life with my other half and at the same time having enough time to mount a serious challenge to obtain the CCIE. Of course, there are the other challenges as well which includes cost (since I am self-sponsoring myself as my company does not need CCIEs) and also balance between work-time and CCIE-time. This has led me to drop off a lot of my hobbies. But after spending over USD $ 4,500.00 (that’s basically all my life savings as of August 2008), I took the risk and decided that I will try to pass the CCIE and I aim to do that before 2012. My wife, Nicole aka Keychain was very supportive of me hence I had all the moral support I needed.
In Malaysia, it is not common for a wife to understand the importance should a network such as I decide to go for something social-killing such as the CCIE. Now, I do made it a point to have peep talk with my network of friends, some of them who are already CCIEs and a handful of them are CCIE candidates like me. Most of them are usually single although there are a few friends who seem to find their other halves. Another thing to consider when I decided to go for my CCIE is my working environment. Most CCIEs in Malaysia will either work with a vendor particularly a Cisco gold or silver partner in which they will be posted to clients' site to work as a engineer, designer, etc. or they will work with an ISP or even Cisco themselves. This will be a very big challenge to me as having very little CCIE-level work experience will mean I am at a disadvantage here compared to those networkers who have for example deal a lot with QoS and BGP (my current company only uses EIGRP and we do not have QoS at all hence all my knowledge on other routing protocols and stuff such as QoS are mainly theoretical at this point).
I have also asked the few CCIE-certified friends of mine who one of them is the first dual CCIE in Malaysia on how they spent their leisure time whether it is on the books or social activities (you know after studying so hard they do deserve a little leeway ;-)) and most of them had either little or very limited social life at all save one particular guy who seems to enjoy a lot of night life and beers and I presume, girls. This lead me to expect spending less time chit chatting with my wife save perhaps dinner and cleaning the dishes and instead more time on hitting the books and at one point, the practice labs.
Now after going through so many questions and answers with my CCIE-certified friends, there is still this one question that most CCIE candidates will ask. Which track? Personally for me, I have huge interest in security but at the same time, I fell ‘in love’ with layer 3 switches and EIGRP. Because of this and my office work which deals mostly with routing and switching issues, plus the addition of having obtained the CCNP earlier on, it seems that the routing and switching track is the right choice for now (although if I passed that one day, the security track will be next on my radar). In Malaysia, it seems that out of the 81 CCIEs (according to the stats on Cisco.com), the routing and switching tracks carries a big chunk of that number followed by security and then voice. Probably most of the Malaysian CCIE candidates like me deals more with routing and switching than any other field ;-).
In case most of you are wondering, one of the two interesting facts to note is that most of my CCIE-certified friends are below the age of 30 (the one with dual CCIEs is in his mid-30s I believe). I guess with the introduction of Dynamips contributed to this even in Malaysia. Since I am 29 this year, I doubt it if I can hit the lab before May 2009 but as the saying goes, you’ll never know since humans plan but God decides. The other interesting fact seems to be no female CCIEs in Malaysia although I may be wrong. The female population in Malaysia as of today still has little or no interest in pursuing professional IT certifications and this I mean certifications as the CCNA, CCNP, CCIE or even other vendor-related certificates. There are abundant numbers of female degree in IT holders though so this is a little strange considering the fact that there are females doing IT degrees but not IT professional certifications. My wife, for those who are interested to know, is currently pursuing her ACCA certification hence I do not have spouse CCIE partner but I guess this is as with most if not all CCIE candidates in Malaysia. Perhaps one day, we will see more females becoming CCIEs. I would like to thank you if you have read this far and I sincerely apologize if my rants were too long. If you have any comments, feel free to drop me a mail at Nickelby [at] hotmail [dot] com or you can visit my CCIE blog at http://cciecisco.blogspot.com . For those who prefer the less technical side of me, you can also visit my personal blog at http://nthane.blogspot.com . Once again, I would like to express my outmost gratitude and thanks to Emmanuel Conde for allowing me to share my CCIE journey (which has yet to end :-)) and for you the readers to take time to read this.
Signing off and back to preparing for the CCIE written exam,
Nickelby Thane.