A new challenge for this year, something I didn’t see it coming, at least not in my foreseeable near future, however thanks to my friend who introduced me to the offer to study a CCNA course for 0 cost (usually costs thousands of dollars), without hesitation I accepted. It is because I was interested in doing CCNA I think that was years ago, I considered why not since it’s an accelerated program, and I made up my mind to do some research. I found that it will take me 8 months to study to be ready for taking the 200-301 CCNA exam in November 2022.
I want to Master the topics of CCNA for three main reasons :
- Always been into computers/IT so having an entry-level certificate like CCNA is a good start.
- Venturing into the tech market.
- It’s a good opportunity for me to improve my planning and studying skills using the learning project method devised by Scott H Young.
So that I stick to my learning challenge and achieve my goal, I have made a learning map which is shown below:
Exploring The Learning Map:
Starting off the map with the Netacad course, which is the official course of CCNA Cisco, It’s three terms long but in my case, I have to finish it in just 3 months, sounds like a short time, isn’t it? but it is doable. I have seen some people who did it just in 2 months but of course, that’s largely depending on how much many hours do you have. Personally, due to lack of time, I will be only willing to give 2.5 hours of study every day which should be enough to tackle and complete the material.
Moving on to the next item on the map, Complete CCNA (200-301) Master Class, a very well-received course on Udemy with 4.7/5 ratings, it’s a good resource for those who are interested in learning the CCNA exam topics. In my case, I will be just using it to review what I learned so far and potentially learn new things or fill up the gaps in the topics that I didn’t understand very well.
The third learning material is going to be another course from Udemy, sorry I am a fan of this platform and I promise you it won’t be the last course mentioned here. The course is taught by one of the leading experts and instructors in the field of networking and specifically anything related to Cisco certificates. Essentially the course focuses on the practical side of CCNA, it will involve you in a lot of labs work, which is a crucial part of the material that needs to be mastered and David Bombal does an excellent job of explaining and solving the labs’ problems. There is one thing you would probably not like about him, his accent because a lot of people find it boring, but that’s a minor issue and it shouldn’t stop you from taking his very well recommended course.
The fourth material isn’t going to be a course from udemy (what a relief!), nope it’s not even a course. It’s a book, a good one for having more labs practice, to test your knowledge and see if what you had so far had helped you to build good problem-solving skills.
By this time we don’t need any learning materials, it’s time for testing our knowledge of the material. I find the ex-sim max for cisco 200-301 to be extremely useful in this regard. it’s well recommended by a lot of people who used this website, and they managed to pull off their exam. it’s not a free exam and it may not be affordable to a lot of people. However, you can get it for a discounted price on special holiday occasions.
Doing a lot of practice exams has its own benefits, getting better grades, that is why I added another course from udemy, it’s not really a course it’s just 6 exams that you can take and confirm whether you are truly ready for the Final exam or not.
At this point of the roadmap, I am done from learning new things. it’s time for reviewing what we have learned from all materials using Anki flash cards to test whether I remembered and understood all the noted concepts.
Now what’s left is taking the exam which should be done in order to get the CCNA certificate.
Planning the learning project
Now that we get the map ready, it’s time to schedule the entire map’s materials on a weekly schedule.
As we mentioned in the previous section, I can only provide 2.5 h per day of studying, that means I have to go bottom-up approach combined with time-constraint approach, at least when it comes to the first 3 months. Because when it comes to the Netacad course I have to finish it in 3 months, the first week will be a double work (5 hours per day), that’s why in the table I have to get 50% of the first subject done. Because planning for the learning project took the limited time I had. but still, I might squeeze more hours if the provided number of hours isn’t enough so based on the daily commitment. From a planning perspective, I can get my entire schedule done in 29weeks starting from 10th of April, that’s 507.5 hours of expected studying. That is to say, I will be passing the exam in the 31th week which happens to be on November.
At the end of the post, I would like to mention that usually, I would go more in depth when it comes to planning, but due to lack of time, I had to only do the most essential steps to allow myself to jump into the learning experience.
Without forgetting, I would like to give a shout out for anyone who is preparing to take the CCNA exam whether you are learning with an instructor or self-learning either ways, may you be successful by taking this path.
