Well that's that! Passed my TSHOOT this morning so I'm now a CCNP!
Happy as larry - whoever larry is.
It's been a lot of hard work, long evenings and expensive electricity bills, but I'm there.
My summarisation on my experience -
ROUTE: Lab lab lab. There's a lot of material to cover in this topic, and a lot of practical can be done to practice. I really enjoyed studying this, and I actually found the exam both enjoyable and intuitive. I used GNS3 while I was on the road, and my lab when I was home. I am definitely more layer 3 than 2.
SWITCH: I found this tougher than route. A lot of people say the opposite, but I just found it a lot drier and less "fun". I didn't think there was as much to lab, I found it a lot more theory than practical. But it's all good stuff. That said, I still did a lot of labbing. The downside was, I could only lab while I was home - but luckily timing worked out well and I hardly worked away while I was studying this. I actually found this exam to be a little awkward - I found myself thinking the questions were a little vague and a couple of answers could have fit. Maybe that's just because I found it hard.
TSHOOT: Troubleshooting is what I do. I've been troubleshooting complex networking systems (often with bespoke hardware that make things run a bit quirky) for 8 years. I found this exam fairly straight forward. I really enjoyed it. One of the multi-choice questions caught me out, but I nailed all the tickets, so it doesn't really matter. I found some of the tickets to be really good. Some were 2-minute jobs, but there were a couple that really got me thinking, sitting back in my chair and taking a minute. It was fun! It really does your ability to logically diagnose a problem - a very fair exam.
Anyway, I'm undecided what's next for me. I don't know whether to persue my CCIE, or do CCNA/CCNP Security. Both would be good for me, I'm just not sure where I want to head. First though, it's a month off with lots of beer!
Thanks to everyone for their support on here, it's been really useful. Time for me to stick around and try and give back.
To the pub!
