Planing the CCIE training

I think that it is really important to make a good planing before getting started with the lab training. A good planing will help you to keep the rhythm along your journey. It is really important to know how to make breaks and to relax your brain. What I did before starting is to make a one year planing following INE´s instructor Petr Lapukhov training plan for the CCIE R&S V4.0. In order to make this plan I used MS Project. It gives an overview over the whole training which force your to meet your goals and keep the pace. For example if everything goes as planed I will take the lab in mid of december 2012. Of course there will always be some delay but I will try as much as I can to stick to the plan.

Furthermore I have made an excel document where I note all the hours I do as well which topics I cover every week.

I will dedicate between 15 and 20 hours to training per week which will give me between 800 and 1000 hours of training at the end. I have seen people passing the lab after 6 months of training which is quite amazing. But in my case I prefer to take time and be sure to master most of the topics really well before taking the lab. The CCIE training is a marathon and not race said Brian McGahan; one of the top certified instructor from INE and I think he is completely right. So in the end it does not depends on how fast you can run but on how long you can run keeping a good rhythm.

Right now I am going through the Layer 2 core topics (VLANs, VTP, STP) and I will start layer 3 core topics from next week (RIP,EIGRP,OSPF,BGP). My first Vol 2 lab is planned for the 17-03-2012; precision of MS project;-)

Thanks for reading and comments are more than welcome. It will be nice to know what is your strategy plan?

/Laurent