Passed - Process Overview

ilikeshells

I passed a couple days ago. Here's my review FWIW.

Background: I've been in IT for 10 or so years. A few years of risk and sys admin/network work. A few C* certs.

Prep: Cybrary. CISSP Official Study Guide 7th Edition. The new Official Practice Tests. CISSP CBK (2nd Edition) just to research a few topics more in-depth, as I bought this years ago when I was thinking about sitting. Materials Review: The CISSP CBK was horrible and had a plethora of just plain wrong information. Cybrary information is solid but did not have much *new* information (I watched it after reading the 7th edition) but it does have a lot of good testing strategies and overviews of key concepts. If you are new to infosec, I would start at Cybrary for a foundation and then move to a book and reinforce with practice tests. 7th edition covered about 60-70% of what I saw in the exam. The new practice questions were great to get me into the mindset and reinforce topics. This helped with an additional 15-20% of exam material and supplemented the 7th Edition quite nicely. 10% or so was not covered at all in my materials.

All in all, I prepped casually for 3.5 months w/ some breaks.

Exam: I definitely over-studied but I prefer to do this and not sweat it during the exam. My exam focused significantly (25% or so) in areas barely mentioned in any of the materials. At least not to the point of spelling out the answer. While I felt the exam not super-difficult, I can see given the common and recommended texts as causing those new, or with heavily operations roles as having difficulties with the exam.

I can definitely say I told myself numerous times to "not overthink" as recommended by Kelly Handerhan (Cybrary) and this was valuable, as I could probably talk myself out of numerous answers. Don't waste your time remembering super detailed intricacies of much, be exposed, but focus on high-level concepts and how all the parts of a security program work together.

EOT

danny069

Congrats! Thanks for the write up! What's next for you, and also, what practice questions are you talking about? The ones online from Sybex?