Are You Ready to Pass?

If you hope to get your #CCENT or #CCNA one day, you will at some point have to choose a date and go take what will likely be your very first Cisco exam. How will you know? Today’s post launches a short series of posts in which I’ll look at some of the ways you can figure out if you are ready.

The decision of whether you’re ready for that first exam isn’t nearly as dramatic as whether you have met the person you want to marry. But what do all the happily married folks tell the single crowd, when asked? How did they know he/she was the one? “I just knew! You will know, too!”.

Touching, yes, but not terribly practical.

If you do the hard work to prepare, maybe you really will “just know” when you are ready for the ICND1 exam or CCNA exam. However, I hear from people, and see posts online, where people seem to anguish over the decision. So this series will try and take a little mystery out of how to know.

To get the ball rolling before the Facebook chat on this same subject, I decided to put together a poll to find out how people decide when to go ahead and take that first test. I’ve listed several reasons in the poll, including “gut feel (I will just know)”. The other reasons:

• Scores on Wendell’s practice tests
• Scores on other practice tests
• Subnet/math speed and skill
• Config skills (Sim)
• Willing to fail, to learn

For the poll, you get one vote: pick the item you rely on the most. Do you rely on the scores you get on practice exams? Is it your confidence and speed with subnetting? Your confidence on Simulation (Sim) questions because of your knowledge and skill with configuration commands? Are you ready, because you do not mind if you fail one time, just to learn about the exam? Or is it even something else?

Click your answers, comment, and I’ll walk through some of these with you over the next few weeks.