Passed CISSP on 10/16
Hello everyone.....It's finally my turn to make one of these threads! I took the CISSP exam this past Thursday, October 16th at 2pm.
A little bit of background on me. This is my 11th year in IT and I have spent 9 of them in my current job. I would say the last 5 years have been a lot more security-focused than my first 6 years, obviously. I spent first 2 years doing help-desk and my current job I started doing desktop support. I proved myself and starting doing bigger projects and while my employer grew, I grew along with it. I became a jack of all trades so I kept some of those desktop support duties and around 2010 I started doing the security tasks as a part of my primary, daily routine. Most of my experience comes from the following domains: access control, governance (risk management, auditing), Disaster Recovery (I work for a hospital), and some physical security.
Being a jack of all trades and being in a smaller facility, although we are a part of a larger networked/business model, allows me to do all these things. That was one of my biggest reasons for staying at my facility when I got by B.A. in Infrastructure Assurance from UT-San Antonio because I knew I was getting verifiable experience in the domains that would allow me to get my CISSP.
While I know some people can just read a few books and pass the exam, I have always had a tendency to be a bit of a worry-wort and over-study. My materials were:
Shon Harris AIO, study guide with questions
Eric Conrad study guide and AIO
OIG
Sybex
Quiz engines:
CCCure paid version
Transcender quiz engine
Clement Dupuis' new cccure.training website with updated CBTs
as well as various other recommended study guides and documents (overly notes, sunflower pdf, etc)
I work two jobs so I originally started slow by reading the Shon Harris book. It was definitely wordy and overly verbose, so a few chapters in I switched to the Conrad book and when I finished that I moved onto the sybex book. After I finished both books (it took me about a month between both jobs), I moved back to the Shon Harris book and decided to purchase the transcender quiz engine to start practicing. All in all, I only did one or two 250 question exams. Because of time constraints, I could never really put together too much time to take any quizzes longer than 50 questions.
After reading countless amounts of passed/failed CISSP threads and studying people's study routines, one thing you have to understand is that it truly is different for everyone. Even looking at people's notes, they may or may not have the information that helps you remember things or "put things together". You really do have to try different quiz engines if you can, different books, etc.
What I did find is that reading the sybex/conrad books were easier to digest. I then switched back to Harris for the things I needed to drill down more on based on my quiz scores.
What I felt helped me was the membership to Clement's new cccure.training website. I could not say enough good things about his new CBTs. The layout of the material and his explanation of things were exactly what I needed. I even watched some of his videos twice. Because I spent so much time with other material and his new website in the weeks leading up to the exam, I neglected quizzing for a while. I went through all 1000 or so transcender questions and had not touched clement's quiz engine in over a month. I ended up taking about 600-700 quiz questions 3-4 days before the exam so I can hammer out the things I didn't know. They helped me determine things I needed to review one last time.
Looking back, a part of me thinks I over-studied but really reviewing a lot of the material helped re-enforce things I thought I "knew". Like JDMurray and other members have said before, it's not really a 'waste" of time when you are learning new information, whether it was on the exam or not.
I can't say enough about the members on here, the forum, the webmaster/mods, etc for keeping this site running and active. One member in particular, Expect, who just passed his CISSP exam was instrumental in helping me pass. So, thanks again everyone and feel free to ask questions in this thread. I'll be sure to keep an eye on it for a few days. Thanks for reading my rant....
