Well, I passed SWITCH this week so I guess that I’m going to be officially hanging out with the network big boys for a little bit.
I started preparation last year but between holidays, work, and life, I had a bit of a gap in there. Overall I would estimate that I spent 3.5 solid months.
Used the following material:
Cisco Press SWITCH Foundation Learning Guide
Cisco Press SWITCH Quick Reference Sheets
Cisco Press SWITCH Portable Command Guide
Cisco Press SWITCH Video Mentor series (Huckaby)
CBT Nuggets SWITCH Series
Various PDFs from PacketLife (First Hop Redundancy, 802.11, 802.1x, STP, VLANS)
BOSON SWITCH ExamSim
(I skipped all of the VoIP/QoS sections for obvious reasons!)
A couple of quick thoughts on preparation:
The Portable Command Guides are awesome! I’m hoping that we see the line expanded to include some of the voice topics at some point.
First time using the Video Mentor series (again, they weren’t available for the CCVP). I found that while they certainly aren’t complete, they worked well for reinforcing a topic. I would watch them in bed right before I fell asleep, and then try to type all of the commands up in notepad the next day from memory.
The BOSON ExamSim was nice for gauging overall progress. I used them just a few weeks before the test and was able to figure out which subjects I need to spend more time on during final preparation.
Also labbed up everything, almost to the point of obsession! I was lucky enough to have a project delayed which left me with 5 3560s piled up in my office for a few months so I was able to setup a lab at work for lunch breaks / late nights, in addition to the home lab.
Overall I thought that the exam was tough but pretty fair. I did run into a couple of questions that were clearly worded wrong to the point where I had to “guess” what they were trying to ask based on the answers. Also had to sweat it out a bit because I ended up spending 50+ minutes on a single question. Time goes by in a blink. If I had to do it again I certainly would have spent less time drawing out the scenario on the dry erase board.
On to ROUTE!
