I passed. Even though I'm working toward my CCIE Routing and Switching, I knew this wouldn't be a chump test. There's only so much I can say about it under the NDA, but here's my results and the steps leading up to it.

Follow up:

Not a bad score, but I don't really consider myself a "B" student, so I'm not terribly thrilled. Back when I took the normal CCNA, I scored a 977, so I hope you'll understand my disappointment. They really did a good job of testing everything listed on the syllabus, so give it a good read.

Regarding that last line, I literally spent a week and a half on this, but it was a really good initial week. I'm a big fan of the Global Knowledge classes, from the facilities and equipment to the instructors and course material. I took their IINS class that is associated with this exam, but I'd like to specify that that sitting this course alone is insufficient. There is so much material to absorb that I'd make an exception to my previous statement for anyone that goes home and studies the material every night. Personally, I went home and worked on some Perl scripts for a major project during lab time and at night when I got home. Thankfully, the course gives you five credits toward the same remote labs that you use during the course, so after the course had ended and I finished the project, I went back and redid the labs. I can't emphasize enough how important that lab time was.

In addition to the Global Knowledge course, I took advantage of sample questions from practice test vendors. Even with a minimum exposure they help set expectionations regarding the difficulty and best of all... typically some of their answers are WRONG. This is a good thing, because you have to know your stuff to spot the bogus info. I was also counting on their being some additional resources in the CCNA prepcenter on cisco.com and sure enough, there's now a CCNA security subset of the site. I ran through the practice VPN and AAA questions and went back through my class notes.

If I had it to do over again, I would've put the overtime in to clear out all my projects to let me concentrate on this class alone, but I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the class.


I'd love to hear about your experiences with this exam, your thoughts on certification and studying, or anything else regarding honing your skills. Good luck!