I attended two CCIE courses, the first one was Narbik’s CIERS-I + bootcamp and the second one was IP Expert’s CCIE One Week Lab Experience. My goal was to see materials from different vendors for workbooks and bootcamps to get as much variety as I could.
Narbik’s CIERS-I +
Narbik’s bootcamp was recommended by many other candidates and it was well worth it. He has been teaching the CCIE bootcamps for quite some time and has a very well defined skill of explaining complex technology in a very easy to understand manner. It was a great combination of lectures and practice labs. Labs consisted of lecture examples to practice and solidify the lecture materials.
Days started early in the morning and lasted well into the late night, at the same time Narbik was able to maintaining your interest with this amusing stories. This was a “geek summer camp” as some of us called it! Another major selling point was that you can retake his class as many times you wish as long as there are spots available. I took advantage of that once and been to his bootcamp twice. Another aspect of the class that I really liked was that it creates a community of CCIE candidates and allows you to exchange ideas, tips and study methods with other CCIE candidates. Well after the class I still keep in touch in many of the colleagues I met there.
IP Expert’s CCIE One Week Lab Experience
As I was getting closer to my second lab attempt, I wanted to take another type of a CCIE course, which wasn’t about teaching you blueprint topics, but help you prepare for the lab in terms of test taking strategy, lab tricks and traps and at the same time give you personalized feedback of each test you did. For that I went with IP Experts’s One Week Lab Experience class taught by Marko Milivojevic. The class consisted of taking two major labs, which are lot more difficult and time consuming than the real labs and then have Marko sit down and grade it with you. After everyone had a chance to solve the labs, Marko would solve each task himself for everyone to see. Seeing him solve the lab taught me a very good strategy of how to attack the lab. What things to look for, what things to watch out for and how to do it in a lot of a faster way. Marko showed us a lot of his shortcuts and time savers that I use all of the time. I especially liked his very stringent grading, which taught me to be very careful with my answers and most of the time it wasn’t the first one that came to my mind. I have to say this greatly challenged me technically and showed me weak areas and at the same time gave me a strategy to attack my second lab attempt.