CCIE Lab Study Tips

Study Tip: CCIE Practice Lab Strategy

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I was reading through the GroupStudy archives and stumbled on this fantastic thread on another CCIE study strategy. In the thread, Brian Dennis from Internetwork Expert notes that a highly successful approach that they recommend for some candidates is “taking only 5 or 6 full scale labs and do them 4 or 5 times each. Then during the last week or two before the real lab taking 2 or 3 additional full scale labs and them once or twice each”.

I think this is great advice. I have been doing labs 6,12, and 18 over and over again and I’ve definitely noticed my speed and accuracy improving quite a bit. I am concerned however that by doing only those three labs over and over again I am just implementing my configs from memory (which I am). It gets to the stage that I don’t even have to look at the questions and I can recite the entire configs for those three labs. This might however (as it is mentioned in the thread) get you used to only a certain topology and make it harder to adapt.

I have decided to go with labs 1,7,8,9,10, & 11 as my next strategy. I will do them in that order and then start again (ie, do 1, 7-11 then start again at 1, 7-11 etc). This is the strategy that is apparently recommended from the Internetwork Expert 12 day bootcamp.

By repeating this larger cross section of labs, all of which have different difficulty ratings (Lab 1 is rated a 5, labs 7-10 is rated an 8 and Lab 11 is rated a 9) my hope is that the configurations become second nature. While repeating the labs like this, my goal is not to memorize the topology or answers (which my last lab strategy led me to do), but to have the configurations become second nature. There are only so many variations of routing loops, hub and spoke frame relay and other technologies and this should expose me to most of them.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Now back to labs!

© 2008 Arden Packeer. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. This material is not sponsored or endorsed by Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco, Cisco Systems, CCIE and the CCIE Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and its affiliates