In this video, our focus is on getting ready for the exam.
What are some study strategies?
And I've got three high-level strategies we're going
to be discussing.
The first one is getting to know the topics on the ENARSI
version 1.1 exam.
And once we know the topics that we're on the lookout for,
we need to schedule our study time.
It's not enough to just have the intent of studying
OSPF on Saturday.
We need to put it on the calendar.
I always say what gets scheduled gets done.
And finally, we need to, as I like to say,
get our hands dirty.
And what I mean by that is get some hands-on experience and we'll
talk about some options for doing that.
But first, how do we know the topics on this exam.
Well, Cisco publishes the exam blueprint and I've given you
a shortcut link on screen.
You can go to Bit.ly, bit.ly/enarsi23
and that's going to give you the exam blueprint for version
1.1 of the exam.
And that PDF that's going to open up gives you detailed topics.
But Cisco categorizes four different high-level topics
for this exam.
Layer 3 technology is making up 35 percent of the exam.
Now as you go through this course, you might have noticed that we
have a couple of modules dedicated to Layer 3 technologies.
Specifically, module number one covered the topics such as
route redistribution, policy-based routing,
and VRF Lite.
And then we had module number two that was specifically focused on
troubleshooting routing protocols.
While combined, those two modules fall
under this 35 percent, the Layer 3technologies
portion of the exam. We've got 20 percent on VPN technologies,
20 percent on infrastructure security, and 25 percent on infrastructure
services.
And throughout all of these topics,
the big focus is on troubleshooting these things.
And once we've downloaded the exam blueprint,
we know what we're going to be studying.
We need to schedule our study time.
And the way this is going to work is going to vary widely from
one student to the other.
But here's an example of how I might approach this.
I might ask myself, how much time could I carve out of
my week to dedicate to studying?
And let's say that I conclude that I could put in about eight
hours a week to study.
Well, that's not specific enough.
I need to identify where are those eight hours coming from?
And I might think, well, I could get up an hour
early every day, Monday through Friday.
That would give me five hours.
I could get up before the family on Saturday,
maybe get three hours Saturday morning of solid study time.
That's going to give me my eight hours of study per week.
Now, what am I going to be doing during these eight hours?
Well, let's say for this course, I might go through this course
again and let's say it takes me 30 hours to do that.
Well, the runtime of the course is only about 12.5 hours,
but I'm going to be pausing a lot.
I'm going to be taking a lot of notes.
I might be rewatching portions, so a little over double the
run length of the course.
That's what I'm going to estimate for my video training.
And then I want to go through the practice questions over
and over again,
carefully reading in that practice exam,
the detailed explanation as to why the correct answer is
the correct answer.
Maybe I spend 10 hours doing that.
Not just the practice exam, but all of the lesson
quizzes as well.
And I want to get some hands-on experience with the labs
in this course.
So I'm going to be downloading those .yaml files,
importing those into my copy of Cisco Modeling Labs.
And maybe I spend 10 hours doing a hands-on practice.
Then I look over that blueprint again and ask myself,
what are my weak spots?
What am I not solid on?
Maybe it's NetFlow, for example.
I want to go back and revisit that topic.
I can watch the video again, and maybe there's an accompanying
lab I can go through again, but I want to set aside about 10
hours to focus on those weak spots.
And if we add everything up, I'm estimating it's going to take
me about 60 hours to prepare for this exam.
And I've already said that I could dedicate eight hours per week.
Let's do some quick math, 60 divided by eight.
That means about seven and a half weeks to get ready for this exam.
And I recommend, once you know this,
you go ahead and schedule your exam for that time.
That's going to do a couple of things for you.
If you are taking this at a facility and not online,
that's going to give you a better selection of locations and times.
And it's also going to give you a little bit of accountability.
Does me anyway, knowing that the date is coming
and I need to be preparing for this exam.
Keeping in mind there is a safety net if you reschedule far
enough in advance, there's no charge for that
rescheduling and you can push it out if you need to.
But personally, it gives me that little extra push
of accountability to know that the date is coming.
Now let's consider some ways to get our hands dirty,
get some hands-on practice.
One option is, with your manager's approval
obviously, you might want to use some non-production equipment
at your company.
I did that when I was preparing for my first CCIE,
and I also bought a home lab and combined with that borrowed
equipment and my home lab equipment,
I had a pretty elaborate setup for that first CCIE.
Another option is to use an emulator,
and I think that's a great solution for
ENARSI exam candidates. And the emulator that I personally
use is CML, Cisco Modeling Labs,
the personal version of that, and I use the less-expensive
version that gives me 20 nodes. That allows me to set up any
single topology that I might need,
and typically I can have multiple topologies running at one time,
and at the time of this recording, it's $199 a year that
I pay for that.
And I've given you some links on screen as to how you can access
CML in the Cisco Devnet sandbox at no cost.
I've given you a link for where you can go buy CML, if you want
to run it on your own gear, and a link to the Quick
Start guide.
Now let's sum up what we've discussed in this video.
We said we had three main strategies for preparing
for this exam.
Number one, we want to know exactly what topics
are on the exam,
and we can find out at a very detailed level by downloading
Cisco's exam blueprint.
And I gave you a link for that that will redirect you
out to Cisco site.
We also want to not just have the intent of studying,
we want to schedule that study time, put it on the
calendar.
And we also want to get some hands-on practice.
And I gave you a few options for doing that.
But as part of this course, recall that you get those .yaml
files that you can download.
And even if you don't own your own copy of Cisco Modeling Labs,
you can access CML for free.
At the time of this recording anyway,
out at the Cisco Devnet sandbox, and you can do your labs there.
And now that we've discussed in this module how to register
for the exam,
we've discussed the study strategies,
let's consider, in our next video, how we can show up as our best
self, psychologically on exam day and do the very best
we're capable of.