CCNA Review

Quick Review

Overall, I highly recommend this certification for any IT field and for anyone to go for. This certification has helped me in every field / path I have gone down in IT. Knowing general networking will be crucial in your success whether you are a developer, sys admin, engineer, etc.

Resources

I used tons of study resources for this exam as it can be quite difficult since this is usually the "big first step" into the networking world. I read both official cert guides about two times over. They can be found and purchased on Amazon. (Just the standard certification books) Another book that helped with labbing was the CCNA Portable Command Guide Book. For labbing I used packet tracer since it was easier at the time then running GNS3 or Eve.

I would also find labbing exercises for free in different community Discords... (Main Cisco study Discord that you can find me in @ https://discord.gg/pXnTwgQFae )

Boson practice tests helped a ton too. Also Jeremy's IT Youtube videos helped me understand some concepts as well. Subnetting doesn't always click first go around. Spam YouTube videos until it clicks.

In order I would say the OCG, Boson, packet tracer labs, and other misc third party sources helped me in passing this cert

Looking Back at the Exam

For me, the hardest part in studying for the CCNA was learning subnetting. It took a bunch of different videos / teachers for me to finally understand it. After it clicks, it is smooth sailing from there so many sure you spend a good amount of time studying subnetting as this is crucial to learn in all areas of IT. Also, make sure you lab, lab, and lab! When I passed the CCNA and jumped into doing projects as a network security engineer, I wished I labbed a LOT more. For me, some concepts do not stick well until I apply them in the real world. Labbing a lot more would have helped tremendously in the field.

Biggest recommendation, get real familiar with the CLI and labbing out topologies! You will thank me later!

Overall, this exam was a perfect jump into networking. It really shows an employer that you know the fundamentals of networking and can be taught more advance topics. As well as this, it shows the employer you can do basic projects right off the bat whether its configuring access layer switches, adding vlans, etc etc.