Hi All,
I've been lurking these blogs for several years now, finally deciding to make a post. Quite an interesting discussion.
@darbyweaver
Hi Darby, I've tried PM'ing you, but for some reason my PM function is not available or functional (or I'm just slow, that's more likely). At any rate, my concern regards you mentioning having taken several stabs at the CCIE lab. Right now I'm still a CCNP candidate, but I'm on track to becoming a CCIE R/S candidate mid-year. Now Looking at this at face value, it looks to me like your company clearly values you as you're obviously quite busy. If you're even half as busy at home as you are at work, I can imagine squeezing time in to practice for CCIE lab is good near impossible. My main question is if time constraints is what's mostly contributing to the repeated lab attempts?
I only ask because I recently made a post in a Cisco Learning Network forum (
https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/message/118784#118784) regarding my CCIE aspirations. Not to rehash it all, but to summarize asserted that starting in July, I'll be afforded the opportunity to take 6-12 months off from working and have a $10k+ training budget to work with toward my CCIE. I don't look at it as an opportunity to sink money into bootcamps (I don't feel I have enough experience for bootcamps to be of any true value to me), but I'll be funding my own training for CCIE R/S (building my own lab, etc). Now of course it's possible that persons from INE, IPexpert, et al could be selling me "pipe dreams", but up until now I've had a pretty realistic expectation that my invested time and effort would help me pass CCIE lab on my first attempt. Do you feel that if you had a similar opportunity that you'd be able to pass your CCIE lab next time around or do you think I'm being unrealistic here? Thanks for your input and please feel free to PM here (or on CLN) if you'd prefer to discuss this in private. Thanks!
PS- Anyone can chime in here or on the CLN site if you have comments or concerns as well; thanks!
