Monday, November 22, 2010

Day 22, PASSED AND DONE!, CCNA/CCDA/CCDP/CCNP renewal, Fort Lauderdale FL

Hello All,

These past 22 days have been GRUELING (except for last night).  Studying 7 days a week, sleeping for 4-6 hrs a night, and repeating it for 22 days has worn out my body and my mind.

I took my final test today, Advanced IOS Unified Communications (VoIP) and passed with a 906.  One of the hardest tests, however, I had the most time to prepare for this one.

In all, out of the 20 people who started only about 7 of them are going to leave with their certifications complete.  This is still pretty good considering the last time I took my certifications, only 3 people out of 22 passed.

Cisco certifications are hard, very hard.  I was reading in one college course that I could get my CCNA within a year.  A YEAR!!!  We do it here in a week.  I was here for just over 3 weeks, and that covered 3 years of materials, they say.

I'd really like to hear from others on their certification experiences.  For me, this is the hardest thing I have ever done.  Some have shared with me...."I could go take all the tests in an afternoon, all 7 of them...because I know a lot about technology..only I have no incentive"  I say HOGWASH!  I don't know anybody who has ever taken a recent technology certification class/test who has come out saying, "That was easy!" 

Anyway, it is done for another 3 years.  Yep, 3 years is all the longer a Cisco certification lasts.  There have been A LOT of new features and functions introduced in the past 3 years.  While I was here, I was also remoted into work about 50% of the time during the day, and nearly ALWAYS at night.  I changed roughly 1500 total lines of IOS statements.  I changed a few routing protocols, removed Rapid-PVST+ and installed MST, put in VRRP, turned off some times, turned on other things.   Overall, I am seeing about a 25% increase in performance. 

So...goodbye from Ft. Lauderdale.  It has been nice.  Too bad we didn't get to enjoy the 70-80 degree weather. 

Tom

No comments:

Post a Comment