Valor85 wrote: » I self studied for ICND1 (CCENT) for about 6 months, on and off. I didn't get serious until I moved from a Desktop support role to Network Engineering within my company. Once that happened, I spent just about all my free time for a good 4 weeks reading Cisco Press manual, watching INE CCNA bootcamp, and labbing with 2 2950 switches and 2 2811 routers I picked up off ebay/craigslist. I passed ICND1 on my first try. I self studied for ICND2 for about 3 months with Cisco Press manual, an INE subscription, and a week long training my company paid for. I probably put in about 10 hours a week due to my schedule plus another 50 hours for the week I had training. Labbing is most important in my opinion. It really helps to fully understand the concepts you're studying. I did a lot of googling to find good lab material. I think as a newbie it's hard to come up with good scenarios on your own sometimes. In my opinion the practice exams provided in Cisco Press and through my training vendor were actually harder than the real one!
