Every once in a while someone will add to the growing list of blog posts with a formula for both understanding and retaining a large body of knowledge and understanding required to clear Cisco Certifications. Petr, who wrote the above prescription, cleared 4 x CCIE exams in 18 months so this clearly worked for him. The fact is though there’s no magic formula that’s going to allow you to compress months of study for an exam overnight.
What you can do however is arm yourself with a structure and set of methods to allow you to spend your study time more effectively. We’re talking about study skills, which is a field of expertise in it’s own right. Here in the UK there’s little emphasis on how to study throughout the education system. However evidence shows that getting this dialled in can be the difference in reaching your goal or falling short.
Before we dive in, it’s worth noting that Cisco’s Certification programme largely removes one of the learning challenges present in higher education – that of selecting and structuring what materials to learn to become a subject matter expert. Whilst many publishers have doorstop size books dedicated to particular certs, Ciscopress books are consistently the goto resource for passing exams. At CCIE level the student is catered for by programmes from a number of learning providers.
I’ve recently been studying for my CCNA Data Centre and notice the increasing integration of more popular study skills into the technical material. Years ago you read the content, then reviewed end of chapter questions to check your understanding. Subsequently these questions shifted to the beginning of chapters. This allowed self-assessment of how well we know a topic content before committing time studying it (more on this later).
Over time a whole series of mechanisms for checking your memory and understanding have been placed at the end of each chapter. A list of key terms and and instructions to come up with short definitions for each to test our understanding. References to appendices containing tables where we have to fill the gaps, testing our memory. Tasks to re-review and repeat key topics we’ve just read highlighting important information. More recently are advisories to complete mind maps for a technology.
As mind maps are something I use in my own studying, I thought it would be useful to run through a few techniques I’ve found helpful in learning.
Mnemonics
We all need more memorable prompts to remember dry technical info. Whether it’s the OSI Model, “please do not throw sausage pizza away” or an Ethernet header “pink seagulls delicately steal their daily fish”.
Here’s a couple of more sophisticated methods:
The link method – using a set of linked memorable images as prompts for dry technical material. The more startling, the less likely you will forget them. I use this for remembering all the fields in an ipv4 header as an example. Impress your friends with being able to do this forwards or backwards.
The Loci method – aka memory palaces. These need not even be real places. If you play a particular computer game a lot, chances are you will already have a ready made palace to fill. This was used by ancient Greeks and Romans, who’s oratorical culture required quantities of information today regarded as vast were routinely committed and recalled from memory.
Notetaking
There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Some people prefer to simply read through books and/or watch videos. In my experience this allows you to speed through the material with a reasonable level of understanding, however doesn’t provide much benefit in committing material to long term memory.
Notetaking takes a variety of forms – highlighting, summarizing, abbreviating to name a few. All of them will force your brain to restructure and rationalise sometimes complex material which takes you to a deeper level of understanding of technologies. There’s no point in writing out an entire book, even if the material is entirely new to you. Instead a common method is to write down a list of important areas, then try and summarise the content within. If you were ever told to write an essay plan before writing an essay at school, this would be like trying to memory recall this framework and the associated content for given subject area.
Mind maps
Another method of committing and recalling information. I’ve used various software to build maps. Take a look at Mindmeister for Google Docs or Mind Maple. Both are free to use. As well as being recommended in the Ciscopress books, they are also in evidence in the Cisco 360 program documentation in mapping out the command line. The idea is to raise your awareness of all available options when completing configuration tasks.
Time Management
You probably have a full time job with limited time to study. Many opinions exist on timeframes in which to complete end to end study leading up to an exam. The smart money is on completing some kind of self-assessment or assessment lab to allow you to target your precious study time to areas you are weak on. Even if it means simply running through all the pre-chapter questions and using the output to allocate time in your study plan, it’s an exercise worth doing.
Like studying internal routing protocols but hate multicast and ipv6? It’s less enjoyable exercising our brain in subject areas we are weak at. Weighting time studying these will foster the same level of comfort and knowledge that you have in your stronger areas. You’re also moving more quickly towards your overall goal.
Armed with the knowledge of your objective assessment, complete a study plan. Google study plans for examples and be sure to re-assess periodically to ensure your studies remain targeted to your gaps.
Practice Tests
Ciscopress books frequently come with a set of test questions which, whilst not up to the standard you will experience in the exam, are useful in giving you a feel for where you are. If taken at the end of your study process, these can act as a confidence boost prior to the exam.
There are some legitimate companies that you can purchase additional questions from for the more popular exams. These companies have come and gone over the years – Selftestsoftware, uCertify andMeasureUp currently offer Cisco tests. The questions are typically a little more challenging than the tests bundled with the books. That said they fall short of the real exam experience and are definitely not essential, so don’t get too hung up on these. Do download any trials on offer from these sites for some free questions.
Motivational techniques
It is easy to lose motivation when studying a large subject area. Splitting this into chunks and using a study plan to track yourself making progress helps stay focused. A couple of methods may help you study when you may otherwise talk yourself out of it.
- Promise yourself you’ll just do one hour. You’ll likely do this and more. This trick also works with exercise if you say you’ll just do 15 minutes.
- Mark down on your study plan the days that you completed study. You’ll be reluctant to break the chain of succeeding in doing this.
Importantly though when life does invariably get in the way, don’t beat yourself up and carry on where you left off.
SI DARLINGTON 