Many CCNA candidates don’t have any clue how to prepare on the CCNA exam.
Many have failed because they didn’t prepare enough.
Many are nervous when the exam date come and failed miserably due to minor mistakes.
And many have asked me the same question again and again:
How to prepare on the CCNA exam?
Well, here are my suggestions, in my point of view, candidates may or may not agree to me, but someone had passed the exam in one shot and had pretty good score with these suggestions.
Here are the 6 Tips to help you pass CCNA exam:
1. BOOKS
Personally I like the work of Todd Lammle, he explains the topics in CCNA exam with easy ways for newbies to understand.
The problem with books is that your eyes can get tired reading them all day long, so I suggest that 2 hours is enough for books.
2. VIDEO TUTORIALS
My recommendation for video tutorial is from CBT Nuggets, especially the author Jeremy Ciaora, great video series.
Sure the video is quite expensive US$ 399.00 for the CCNA Certification Package, but I’m telling you its worth the money.
In the video you can watch configuration of true Cisco devices along with the explanation, for me Jeremy Ciaora did a great job in explaining the topics.
The video is great but sometimes it doesn’t cover everything about the exam, that’s why you also need the books.
3. BLOGS/SITES
Browse the net, find free exam questions that you can try answering, find out how everyone did the exam, how they succeed, how they failed, this can be a very valuable lessons for you.
4. CISCO SIMULATORS
You can get many free Cisco Network Simulator from the internet:
Dynamips - free router simulator using command line interface (no GUI)
GNS3 - GUI version of Dynamips
Boson NetSim - paid simulator complete with labs samples
Cisco Packet - free simulator from Cisco
It is very important to get your hands on one of these simulators, you need to get yourself a hands on experience with cisco devices.
5. QUESTIONS BANK
Get yourself used to the questions in the exam, cram your brain with the questions available online.
I used Pass4Sure and trained myself to get used to the questions. These kinds of questions also have the right answers and the reason why you should choose those answers.
6. EXAM SIMULATOR
Once you get used to the questions in the exam, it’s time to test your knowledge using the exam simulators.
I used SelfTest software to do this, it has a great list of exams that you can choose, but it can cost you more than US$ 100. The good thing about this software is that it tracks down and assesses your answers, giving you the end score similar to how the real exam would.
SelfTest also can simulate not only multiple choice questions but also drag-and-drop, network simulator questions. Some other software might have bugs in the drag-and-drop and simulator questions.
You can also get free exam simulators such as the Visual CertExam.
That’s all I got to say right now. I hope the above things can help you out. If you have any other suggestions, please leave your comment.
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