Review: Cisco CCIE 360 TechTutorial at Cisco Live 2009

The LTRCCIE-2746 Techtutorial was given at selected times and dates to
people who attended Cisco Live 2009 in San Francisco for an additional
$400.00 per student.

The time given for the TechTutorial was 4 hours.

The instructors/staff present were:

Bruce Caslow
Paul Borghese
Val Pavlichenko
Johnny Bass
Bill Burns
R. Smith from Cisco
Ivan from NMC

We had about 16 or 17 people in the class.

We actually had a little less than about 2 hours to perform the lab.

The lab was a slightly modified version of the 1-Day Lab offered by NMC in
2006 with the exceptions that the layout had changed a bit to that of the
CCIE Accessor with resepect to physical cabling, and a few items were no
longer present (IPv6 and say authentication) and in return at least 3 items
were added to the mix. The lab was otherwise functionally the same as the
previous lab.

The CheckIT grading system is phenomenal and has actually improved in
accuracy of grading and in terms of being more precise. The answer key is
still about equal to the 2006 variant of the same exam.

The instructors and lab assistants were awesome. Guys like Paul Borghese
and Johnny Bass were very professional and timely in answering any questions
regarding the lab.

My only complaint was that there was not a little more time to complete the
lab. Johnny Bass mentioned he had completed the lab in 1 hour and 15
minutes which is pretty awesome and quite a benchmark. I estimated I'd have
needed at least 2 hours and 30 minutes using my more careful step-by-step
approach to the lab and the rest of the time I'd have used to doublecheck.
I'm happy to say only one issue eluded me (and only because I had planned to
resolve the issue but had failed to see at least what I'd call the most
important reason why I needed to resolve it - Ouch! But I have improved a
bit over the this time).

I had not seen the lab in over 3 years so it was still fresh to me. I had
score only 20 and 28 points on the similar version of the lab back in
2006... Yep - Weak.

However, I'd scored a 37 this time (and technically there were about 6
points that I think I'd have caught in my review regarding QoS and a simple
copy and paste issue that did not work as I'd expected in my first run).
Anyway it was apparently either a higher than average score but not by much
and to think back in 2006 I spent about 12 hours on the lab twice and still
would have never answered everything correctly.

The quality of the lab was excellent and the Cisco CCIE 360 Staff were
pleasant, well-trained, well-prepared, and extremely knowledgeable. Totally
as expected.

Now speaking to students in my other TechTutorial and from this class some
thought and said that the class was kind of a sales pitch.

I'd say it was more informative of what the Cisco CCIE 360 Program has to
offer. I expected this and was not disappointed in the least.

The Cisco CCIE 360 Program offers a structured approach to taking the CCIE
Lab.

It does have its price tag. It does offer a limited use of 6 months to 1
year depending on the product purchased. So I guess the word is
subscription based.

The program now has some 30+ Certified Instructors for the program globally
and is growing every day.

Bruce mentioned some of these instructors would be inclined towards
development efforts such as guys like Val for instance.

Other instructors such as Narbik are allowed to offer their own curriculum
and offering in addition to the Cisco CCIE 360 Program.

I'm not sure how that is going to work out as many may well have their own
products already. However, it seems that the price of each instructor's
offering are going to come with a certain premium over and above the
pre-CCIE 360 Program. This reminded me of a franchise fee of some sort.
Apparently the company or instructor is allowed to accept Cisco Learning
Credits in return for this fee.

The team was nice enough to allow each student an additional time slot to
re-take the lab for a full 4 hours to see where the student actually stands
upon request.

My recommendations for the course is that is become an 8-hour offering
versus a 4 hour offering in the future to allow time for breakout sessions,
one-on-one, time to complete the 4-hour lab offering, and at least 1+ hours
to allow the students to review the CheckIT Engine and its awesome
capabilities.

My compliments to Johnny Bass, Bill Burns, the NMC staff, and our own Paul
Borghese.

Oh as far as the sales pitch it really wasn't that bad at all. Bruce
mentioned that the program is now unbundled and could be purchased
separately now a time or two. Again not bad at all and not really that much
of a real sales pitch.

Various Cisco CCIE 360 Program Instructors and Staff made themselves
available thoughout the conference in the Certification lounge to answer
questions and show off the merits of the program.

If you need more help or information: Paul Borghese is the list owner here
at Groupstudy and is a wonderfully helpful instructor as well and I'm sure
he'd love to tell you more about the program.

By the way: The level of difficulty of this exam was about equal to what
one might expect for about 60-70% of a real CCIE Lab by my "too experienced"
point of view of the matter and it was very much on par with the CCIE
Accessor Labs in terms of difficulty and task requirements.

Personal opinion: I'd like to see more labs of about this level of
difficulty and complexity from all vendors both Cisco CCIE 360 and non-360
alike.

Of course this is a personal review not influenced or paid by anyone else.

I'm insterested enough to see the rest of the CCIERS-Labs to see if they are
all remapped. One of the things I kind of hate is having to re-cable or
re-think an entire physical pod each time I want to work on a particular
company's lab.

Let's face it there are 6 Routers and 4 Switches and maybe up to 3 Backbones
in a Rack for RS. Cisco is not particular about keeping this a secret and
it seems to be fairly well known. I know why every vendor had their own pod
layout but that's so.... 1999.

My biggest plea to any vendor: Let's keep a lab to about 8 hours worth of
work. That is the point. And now going forward, let's think about maybe
5.5 hours worth of a rack. Yes some things will need to be pre-configured
and no some things won't - those in the know, will know the difference and
even know why.

Later

Darby

Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
Received on Fri Jul 17 2009 - 16:52:11 ART