RE: How do you know when you're ready?

From: Lloyd Ardoin (Lloyd@TheWizKid.biz)
Date: Mon Aug 25 2008 - 15:27:11 ART

I think this is a tuff question becuase it is more than just your knowledge of
the techology although that obviously has to be there. I was told by a very
smart guy that if you are not scoring at or close to 100% on the IGP section
of your mock labs then you are definitely not ready. Other than that it comes
down to what other technologies you might see, your time management and
organizational skills and something that is not talked a lot about but how you
handle the psychology of the whole event. For most of us it involves making
travel arrangements, the travel which can be stressful in itself and then
sleeping in a hotel room the night before which I have never done very well.
One of the best suggestions that has been provided is to make an outline of
each section with the list of tasks and points to help you with time
management and organization, read the lab all the way through before starting,
drawing your own diagrams to help familiarize yourself with the network layout
and ip address scheme, but how many people really do these things and practice
them in advance? One of my great faults is having a difficult time leaving a
task and moving on if I can't get it done in an appropriate amount of time and
that can be a fundamental cause of failing and I know it! Another suggestion
has been to do all the core tasks, do the tasks that provide you full
reachability first and come back to fill in the gaps. Sounds easy but I have
found in practice can be difficult to do for me and probably for others. And
we all know that we have to be very familiar with the DOC CD/DVD in situations
where we have to look up something that is not familiar to to verify a correct
implementation of a task, which means read, read, read. How do you know when
you are ready? That is a question that we all have to answer for ourselves and
some of us will be right and others will not. And if you go and don't get your
number then you were not ready and willl have cost some time and money to find
that out and you can take from that experience to fill in the missing pieces.
I think being ready is more than just having the technologies in hand but that
is a large part of it, putting in the hours and doing the work but there is
all that other stuff too. Going and not getting your number is not
failing...giving up is failing...

 Lloyd V Ardoin

From: Paul Cocker
Sent: Mon 8/25/2008 2:55 AM
To: 'Narbik Kocharians'; 'Scott Vermillion'
Cc: 'Jonny English'; 'GS CCIE-Lab'
Subject: RE: How do you know when you're ready?

But how do you know when you know 95% of the subject matter, if you can't
rely on mock labs?

-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
Narbik Kocharians
Sent: 25 August 2008 07:39
To: Scott Vermillion
Cc: Jonny English; GS CCIE-Lab
Subject: Re: How do you know when you're ready?

Johnny,

* I keep pushing it back thinking the extra 2 weeks is going to help and
I'll be able
to do a few more labs.*

What do you do in that 2 weeks? Do you do more mock labs? When you do the
extra mock lab/s, do you learn many little things that you were not aware
of, or are you just learning a point here and there?

When you know 95 percent of the material that is when you should take the
exam and we know that the remaining 5 percent is one of those "007"
configurations.

You also have to understand that *some* of these mock labs have absolutely
NO relevance to the real test or real networks. Sometimes they are
created by some vendors so they can say that they know how to create some of
these weird labs and their mock labs are much harder than the actual test.
In CCIE that means NOTHING. The subject/material is NOT cumulative and that
philosophy does not apply here.

What i am trying to tell you is "hey don't panic because you did not or were
not able to perform some of the tasks in lab 65 by XYZ vendor", because that
does not mean anything.

The real exam is not that complex, and its an attainable goal, one of my
students that took my boot camp was very ready, and two weeks before his
exam he took one of these simulated labs through this vendor, and he did not
get a good score, and he was very disappointed, i asked him NOT TO WORRY and
i asked him to totally ignore the test results, and he did just that, he
took the real test and passed on his first attempt.

One thing you need to be aware of is that passing on the first attempt is
somewhat lucky, i passed my SP in my first attempt and i am the first to
tell you that i was very lucky because there were few questions that i could
have configured them differently.

So if you think that you are ready, stop waisting your money and pull the
trigger, that is the best scale, little expensive but the best scale.

Good luck mate.

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 8:49 PM, Scott Vermillion <scott_ccie_list@it-ag.com
> wrote:

> Hey Jonny,
>
> A lot of people pass never having felt "ready" for the beast, so you must
> be
> in a pretty sweet spot! I would say that all you have to lose at this
> point
> is some cash but what you stand to gain is the experience of the lab
> itself,
> which is a reasonably good investment pass or fail (assuming, of course,
> that you're already in "the zone" that you so clearly are). Having said
> that, it might be a good idea to ask yourself honestly what your soft
spots
> might be and then map out a plan of attack for final prep. Set your date
> accordingly and then put it out of your mind completely to change your
date
> (mulling that sort of thing over is itself an unproductive distraction).
I
> can recall thinking that I needed >just a few more weeks< for a couple of
> months leading up to my date in SJ but once I got past the 30-day point of
> no return/refund, a certain level of focus materialized. I personally
shut
> out all distractions -- dare I say it...including the list -- during that
> final month of intense prep.
>
> And yes, Cisco Assessors and vendor mock labs are a pretty good gauge of
> readiness, IMHO. Not perfect, of course, but they're a reasonably good
> measure of both your technical prowess and your time management/lab
> strategy
> posture...
>
> Best!
>
> Scott
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
> Jonny English
> Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 8:07 PM
> To: GS CCIE-Lab
> Subject: How do you know when you're ready?
>
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering, how do you guys know when you are ready to sit the lab?
>
> When it comes time to booking a date, I make a booking a month out, then
> I always look for dates 2 weeks from the booked date and book that. I keep
> pushing it back thinking the extra 2 weeks is going to help and I'll be
> able
> to do a few more labs.
>
> I actually feel ready, I did the cisco assessor lab over the weekend and
> got
> a score that was ok. Similar to what other people get, and they pass.
>
> So I thought I'd ask, when do you guys just bite the bullet, pay for the
> lab
> and tickets and go sit the thing?
>
> Thank You,
> J
>
>
> Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
>
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>
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> _______________________________________________________________________
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>
>
> 

--
Narbik Kocharians
CCSI#30832, CCIE# 12410 (R&S, SP, Security)
www.MicronicsTraining
www.Net-Workbooks.com
Sr. Technical Instructor

Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net

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