How long did it take you to get EA from start to finish?

Just as the subject says: how long did it take you to get Ent Admin from start to finish(start being any of the five exams to the very last one)? I've been doing general server maintenance and a few setups for a few years already, as well as heavy deployment with Win7 and WDS since August '09. I don't anticipate any issues at all with 680, but I don't know about the others. I'll likely pick up EDA 7 along the way as well, since it's just one more exam and should be fairly quick.

I desperately need a new job, but don't want to start cold-calling the VARs and partners in town until I have a credential worth mentioning. I'm afraid that if I call them now without having a useful credential to them, I'll lose my element of 'initial interest' and they won't look as closely next time.

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Comments

Hyper-Me

6 months, actual time that went by.

Time that I spent actively studying, probably 8-10 weeks.

veritas_libertas

Can I ask how much experience you had with Server 2008 before you started on your 6 month journey Hyper-Me? Also out of curiosity, what material did you use?

Hyper-Me

veritas_libertas wrote: »

Can I ask how much experience you had with Server 2008 before you started on your 6 month journey Hyper-Me? Also out of curiosity, what material did you use?

I started ~June 2009 with the Vista exam, which i had lots of experience with as I deployed 650 vista machines the previous August.

I had been labbing Server 08 hard since January 09 due to designing the AD environment and evaluating products that tie into AD for my previous employer. So that kind of went hand in hand with learning the 08 concepts for the exams. I had access to several Dell PE 2950s and R700's to run VMs.

When I say 6 months, its just that i took the exams from june 09 to december 09. I did 620, 680. 640, and 642 within about a month. I did 643 in September and then 647 in December. I got very busy which is why I waited so long to finish (though I shouldnt have).

For actual study I used a lot of Trainsignal and CBT nuggets videos, technet reading, MS Learning catalog videos, and MS press books. I think for 640 i also browsed the ExamCram real quick.

I also did 652, 686, Server+, and Project+ in the same timeframe.

alokin123

If i pass my 70-647 exam on Monday then about 6 months of solid study. I also did the 70-646 exam and the 70-624 exam amongst that so it could potentially have been 4 months.
I would recommend doing 70-640 (or 83-640) and 70-647 together. There is a lot of overlap.

If you have the money i would definitely recommend testout and cbtnuggets