Hi All,
Before starting on my last 28-days of study I personally felt pretty confident with the CORE Technologies as I was completing the WBIII Labs in about 2-3 hours. I had also completed five IE Mock Labs scoring between 61-77. This made me feel that I was nearly ready and that I should use the last 28-days as a period of revision/practice rather than learning brand new technologies.
My last month of study started by me completing the R&S Bootcamp Class-on-Demand (5-Day) again. I had done the Bootcamp back in April and found that working through the bootcamp a second time was useful as a kind of revision tool. I found that I could now answer a lot of the questions without referring to any documentation, which was a great confidence booster. On the reverse side I found that I had forgotten how to resolve a few questions in the bootcamp so this highlighted a few areas where I knew I needed to research more.
After the bootcamp I used the Cisco DOCCD and also the excellent "R&S Advanced Technologies Class-on-Demand v4.5" to study my weak areas, which in my case happened to be Multicast, QOS, Security plus a few IP Services. It had been about 5 months since I last looked at the Class-On-Demand and what I found was that watching it a second time around made me realize that I had not initially fully taken in everything Brian/Brian had been talking about on certain technologies. Watching it a 2nd time around helped solidify my understanding of my weak subjects.
With about two weeks to go I completed WBII Labs 1,8,9 in their entirety and also read through every question and every answer of every other Lab in WBII. This was both a useful revision exercise and also a chance to do some practice labs again. I was finding at this stage that I was remembering the answers to a lot of the questions in the Labs and could complete them in my head without configuring any live routers.
With about 4 days to go before my exam I actually hit a brick wall. I had been studying 8-10 hours a day before an after work and during my time off work I was studying maybe 15 hours a day. I think my buffers in my head had become full and my personal decision was take some time out to relax. I actually took some time out to play golf, go the gym or maybe swim during the day and do some light reading/revision in the evenings for a few hours. I did this because I felt prepared.
One more thing to mention was that during my last four weeks I also skimmed through my trusty old "Cisco Cookbook by O'Reilly". My book is probably about 5 years old and some of the information in the book is slightly outdated, but I found it very useful to jog my memory on my weak areas. The beauty of the Cookbook is you can turn to a specific recipe and read through between 2-4 pages that provide you with a configuration example and explanation.
So that was it. I appreciate that my method of preparing will be different to a lot of others, but found that the above worked for me. It is the hard work during my initial 5 months of studying that got me to a point where I felt I had a good chance of passing the exam.
The most important thing I learnt from my exam experience was that verification is absolutely vital. I completed the Lab in about 4.5 hours barring a few questions that I didn't fully know the answer to and then spent the best part of 2 hours reading through every question again and checking every one of my configuration answers. My verification enabled me to spot that I had made some really simple mistakes or maybe where I had broken some rules of earlier questions. If I had not verified every single question in the exam then I fell that I may well have failed.
Fortunately for me at 2.15 am the next morning I received my CCIE Number and knew that all the hard graft had paid off. More importantly I now feel a much better Networking Engineer as I feel as though I understand the R&S Technologies in much more detail. It is not only the CCIE Number that you are after it is as Brian quotes "Internetworkexpert wants you to become a CCIE as a result of being an expert", so thank you to IE for making me a better engineer.
Hope this may help someone out there. Good Luck to you all.