CCDE Pursuit & Blog

malcybood

Shedd wrote: »

Hi malcybood. I'm working on my ccde too.
Have you attenden in any ccde trainings like ERGUN, JEREMY OR ine ? Im asking beause want to compare real exam with training scenarious. Which is more closed?

Hey,

I attended Jeremy Filliben bootcamp in Oct 2015 and signed up to Orhan Design World earlier this year. I haven't done Orhan bootcamp but it has helped many students.

I respect both Jeremy and Orhan but wouldn't recommend one over the other as I've only been on Jeremy's course and he has been with me all the way so far but Orhan is also a great guy and I've had some dialogue with him that has helped me along the way. They both want their students to succeed.

INE is required imo but for what an individual course costs and what an AAP costs I would suggest you get the AAP for 12 months when a sale comes up. This will give you access to the CCDE materials and also CCIE SP v3/4 and RS videos where some of these may be required to hone your knowledge

In addition to the above I suggest you have a safari subscription for the reading list and use livelessons for IPv6, multicast and QoS.

Cisco Live is great - watched around 50 different sessions multiple times but sure you are aware of the key ones. If not let me know and I can provide a steer.

Martin Duggan has also recently released a scenario which is excellent if you search for "martin duggan CCDE Leanpub" you will find it.

I'll be honest that nothing is identical to the real exam. It's one of those where you don't believe it until you see it but the stuff I recommend above should get you through. It's a rocky road to CCDE and you need to be up for the fight!

Best of luck

bender000

I have a few queries which I hope you don't mind answering, since you're one of the rare beasts that's gone into the real thing (not asking for anything NDA related!)

- how much advanced MPLS topics were there? The syllabus doesn't really give any guidance, and the OCG basically touches on everything, even stuff like PBB-VPLS, EVPN, BGP mVPN (mLDP vs RSVP transport), inter-domain etc. Learning this stuff in depth means basically doing most of the CCIE SP, to what level would you need to know these topics?
- how much ISIS is there? I'm an enterprise RS guy so all my ISIS is pure theory / acquired as part of my JNCIS-SP.
- how close was Jeremy's course (the 4 scenarios/sample questions) to the real thing? I'm debating whether its worth 1k USD. Martin Duggan's scenario is a no brainer being 60USD but 1k is a lot of dough.

My main gripe is that unlike the CCIE blueprints (Whether RS or SP), the individual technologies are not detailed and so you're not really sure what you have to know.

malcybood

Hi All,

Long time since I've updated the thread but instead of leaving it hanging I wanted to drop in wth an update......

.....that I passed on my August 2017 attempt

CCDE #20170037

I'll be writing a blog post on my journey, but in summary I started out totally unprepared and underestimated the complexity of Cisco expert level tracks as I do not have a CCIE, but held CCNP/DP with 13 years industry experience (about 8 years net design) when I started out in May2015.

It was a steep learning curve at times despite having real world experience, but this exam is a beast and the subject matters are wide, specifically in the Setvice Provider space where I'd only really worked for a few years - the rest of my experience was enterprise.

I also had a second child and dealt with the May 2017 cancellation that I was scheduled to take and this meant I was 9 months between my last attempt in Nov 2016 and successful attempt in Aug 2017.

Had to wait 11 weeks and 1 day to find out the result and got my number over the weekend where I checked Pearson and Cisco cert tracker almost every day prior!

So happy that I finally got there. Met some great people along the way and was a really great journey overall.

More details to follow around the materials I used, methods and strategy to come later and I will post the link when it's complete, but for now I owe some time to my family (whilst I try to convince my wife what I want to do next).

Cheers

JoJoCal19

Wow many congrats on the CCDE!!