ICND1 and ICND2 Passed

[raty2021]

Background:

I am a BS CS Graduate of 08. Postponed taking or even trying test. Did not even want to bother at the time. Lots of other things felt more important. (no certificates, just life and actually finding work etc)

During my time in school I took Cisco academy course exploration 1-4.

So two years later I finally decide to go through and take them. My only prior history was the exploration courses and some in class labs.

ICND1 was taking after 2 weeks of study, two weeks taken off, then 1 week of study for ICND2. So in about 5 weeks I had passed both on the first take.

To study I divided it up into 3 parts

1) I used the exploration 1-4 again. Did the labs via packet tracer that were important and actually took longer then 5-10 mins to do and VLSM practice. Took solid notes.

2) CBT Nuggets, with chicken scratch notes, I did not emulate these as labs. Just review/absorbed.

3) Reading, I used CCENT/CCNA book. Taking again notes, but only on things that were hazy or difficult/thick to memorize/"get a complete understanding for".

3.5) Reviewing whatever pieces from above that were (difficult/thick to memorize/"get a complete understanding for".)

You can of course also use cisco's practice questions to see what section you may be weak on in regards to questions, but they wont help you much with debug/troubleshooting as much as labs will.

I visited a lot of different little forums and big ones to look for specific topics when things popped up that didn't seem to work right or were confusing.

This was my journey in a nutshell, and i wish all of you good luck. They really are not as crazy as some people make them out to be. Understand the material, consume it, enjoy it, live it and pass it.