Hi guys,
Through this post I want to share my study plan of my personal challenge: getting CISSP within one month!
Why in one month?
Currently, I am almost 7 years in the field of financial audit & IT-audit. With both a BSc as MSc degree in Auditing, I am now following the part-time post-master course to become a qualified financial controller (in The Netherlands: RC). Besides that I am married and have two lovely kids. For me, it is just not working combining this life with a CISSP study plan for several months. So, then I started thinking about it and talking to people. Can it be done in just a month besides working? Yes, I think it's possible and that drives me forward to it.
So, how did you start?
The first thing I did was creating an account on Pearson Vue ICS^2 and booking the exam: April 11th, 2016. So, no arguments to become lazy, go!
And then?
I looked at different study materials. The official CISSP book is really not working for me. Way too heavy (both physically and mentally) and it meant that I had to read and understand 50 pages a day, where day is defined as: '20.00PM-0:00AM'. So, I bought the ' CISSP Study Guide 3rd Edition' of Eric Conrad and started reading from chapter 1. Everything that seems important to me, I write down. Besides that, I downloaded the Audio Course of Shon Harris (be warned: it needs to be updated to the CBK 2015) and listens every day 2 hours to it when travelling to my work (1 hour to and 1 hour from my work). See:
McGraw-Hill Education | CISSP Practice ExamsWhere are you now?
Yesterday, I finalized reading (and writing down my notes) the CISSP Study Guide. Besides that, I started with making practice questions of CCC (freepracticetests.org), every day a minimum of 50 questions. Although I read posts on the internet telling these questions are not really representative to the real exam, it helps me to remember key things.
Today I got a new idea and already started with it: all Acronyms (and their meaning) of CISSP can be questioned on the exam. So I created an account on a online word-tester (some old-school platform I regular used on high school for learning French/German words
) and started typing in each CISSP acronym and its meaning. By this platform, I can test myself. The platform will show the acronym, then I can try to think about the meaning for a couple of seconds and then the answer will be showed automatically. That platform has also an iPhone app, so I can test myself everywhere (waiting in the supermarket, in the traffic, while waiting on the dentist etc.). And don't think of this to be stupid, I mean, consider that you need to know about 900-1000 acronyms (look at the Glossary of the CISSP Study Guide of Eric Conrad). Of course, it is important that you understand the concepts for the long-term, but on the short-term, you really just need to know that XP means Extreme Programming, that TOCTOU means Time of Check/Time of Use etc. Knowing the meaning of an acronym can really help during the exam I think.
What will you do next this?
From now on, I will only make practice questions, looking up my false answers, learning the acronyms, reading the Code of Ethics and finalizing the Audio Course of Shon Harris.
How do you think about your exam on the 11th of April?
I really don't know what I have to expect. I mean, the practice questions are going well and recently I found some other practice resources as well (I will share them asap). But all is just an approximation of the real exam. I think I need not to understimate the 6 hours length of the exam and the impact this will have on my concentration. But we will see.
I will keep you informed of how things are going and will share the practice websites asap.
Cheers.
Arno
