Today I’m going to begin taking a stab at estimating the time it takes to prep for both the QoS and CIPT exams. I picked those 2 CCVP exams because they sit at opposite ends of the skill spectrum for CCVP. I’ll give a little of my rationale, and a few perspectives on self-study resources. Your job will be to tell me where you think I’m off base on the estimate and where you think its pretty close.
The first choice that has some impact on the time is whether to take a class, or do self-study. For the sake or argument, I’ll estimate the time required for a class to be the same regardless of skill level. Alternately, you could read a book, with the time required being smaller if you have more skills when starting the study process, because you can skim the sections about which you already know a lot.
Besides the class or book, in both cases, you need to study, like taking sample exams, practicing in a lab, reviewing the course/book materials, and so on – I’ll quantify those items as the same whether you go to class or read a book.
Frankly, the most likely place to find books related to the CCVP exams is at https://www.ciscopress.com/. That’s not just marketing bluster – while there are other technology books available from competitors, Cisco Press is the only traditional publisher that I know of that has books specific to the CCVP exams. So I’ll focus on what Cisco Press has to offer.
To find the currently-best book for any Cisco exam, it helps to know a few code words in the Cisco Press titles. These code words aren’t secrets, but unless you cared a lot about the book business, it’s easy to miss. In short:
- If the title includes “Authorized Self-Study”, the book contains the information found in the Cisco authorized curriculum that you’d see in class – at least for a particular version of the authorized course.
- If the title includes “Exam Certification Guide”, the book attempts to explain all the topics related to a particular version of an exam, including several useful self-study tools (eg, practice quizzes on the CD).
- If the title includes neither “Authorized Self Study” nor “Exam Certification Guide”, then while it may well cover topics that are on an exam, the book may not cover all topics related to a particular exam.
So, for a more comprehensive book for a single exam, you’d want the book with either “Authorized Self Study” or “Exam Certification Guide” in the title. A quick look at the Cisco Press CCVP web page shows that there’s a QoS Exam Cert Guide, but no “Self Study” Guide. Conversely, there’s a CIPT Self Study Guide (based on Call Manager 4.x), but no Exam Cert Guide. So, choosing a self-study book in each case is relatively easy. If both types were available, depending on your budget, you could get and read both. If you buy only one or the other, I’m partial to the Exam Certification Guides, but that’s an admittedly biased opinion.
With that out of the way, next I’ll toss some numbers out there for consideration.
I’ll break down the time investment into the following components:
1) Take the class, or
2) Read the book
3) Review/study the class/book after finishing it the first time
4) Study using practice tests
5) Gather or buy lab gear
6) Experiment on the lab gear
For these, I’m going to assume that getting a lab together for practicing is 10 hours of effort, but there’s a lot of variation. For the rest, they’re affected quite a bit by the skill level of the person when they start studying (see Tuesday’s post for a definition of the skill levels shown here.) I’ll start with the QoS exam today. Note that the QoS ECG book has about 650 pages in the main chapters of the book, and that the totals in the table list 2 numbers – one for taking the class, and another for reading the book instead.
There’s the raw estimates – now tell me what you’d estimate differently for yourself, and what your incoming skill level would be for QoS. If you’ve taken either the QoS or CIPT exams recently, give us a guess at to the time you spent – and where you spent more time that my estimates above. Next post, I’ll break down my estimates for the CIPT exam, but feel free to make your own estimates here as well. Some things to consider with CIPT are:
- The exam covers materials comparable to the 5-day CIPT1 and 3-day CIPT2 courses – but most Learning Partners offer a bootcamp that covers both.
- The Cisco Press book for CIPT covers CM 4.x only, not 5.x, and is about 850 pages in the core chapters.
