In this final chapter of the book, we provide numerous suggestions about how you should approach studying for certification exams. These suggestions are meant to build on one another, and they deliver the best results if used in combination. Nevertheless, you should feel free to pick and choose among them. Although we strongly urge you to try them all, you should use only those that work for you.
No matter what kind of IT certification you might choose to pursue, you'll want to start with related exam objectives and work your way through from start to finish. The idea of outlining from objectives applies at each step along the way:
Begin your studies by reviewing the objectives, making sure you understand what they mean and what topics, concepts, and technologies they cover.
As you read through self-study materials or go through online or classroom training, relate the elements you're learning about to specific exam objectives. Many forms of study material—particularly study guides and practice exams—make a point of establishing this relationship for you. If you get in the habit of doing this for yourself, you can annotate a set of exam objectives with related information and use that to guide your review just before you take an exam.
As you take practice exams, make a note of the questions that relate to specific objectives. When you review, you can skip the ones you know well and concentrate on the questions you're less sure of. This is one of the best ways we know of to review for an exam.
After you go through your study materials and practice exams, look over your annotated objectives. Is there anything that you can't relate to the materials you've already checked? If so, you better look around for more materials so that you can decide what you're supposed to know about such “mystery objectives.”
By organizing your studies and practice around the exam objectives, you'll keep a clear eye on your final goal: passing the exam. Because you can make sure you've covered everything as you study, you're far less likely to be surprised than you would be otherwise. (It can still happen because vendors and organizations add new questions to their exams on a regular basis.)
There are two kinds of groups that you can join (or form) to help improve your odds of passing certification exams. One of these kinds of groups may already exist, but you might have to form the other kind. The first kind is a local branch of a user group related to the vendor or organization that sponsors your chosen certification. The second kind is an ad hoc group, which we call a “study group,” that results when you bring a group of individuals together to share notes and experiences, answer questions, and debate a set of exam objectives.
User groups exist for many of the certifications covered in this book. By using your favorite search engine with a search string such as user group and Windows 2000 or user group and Cisco, you can turn up pointers to local, national, and international user groups. Most such groups have local chapters in most major metropolitan areas and regional chapters in less heavily populated areas. Many such groups operate ongoing certification review study sessions and discussions; some even offer classes (for example, we've taught free classes at the Central Texas LAN Association [CTLA] in Austin, Texas).
Likewise, joining a user group can boost your buying power. It's not unusual for such groups to negotiate discounts on study guides, official press materials, practice exams, and even the software or systems that you need to get ready for a certification exam. Also, many user groups offer to their members free access to test labs and training sessions. Annual membership fees for these groups seldom exceed more than a couple hundred dollars, so this is another good way to get some hands-on experience while preparing for exams.
Local study groups are more ad hoc than user groups and require you to identify or assemble a group of people who share a common focus on the same certification exam. At user groups, such assemblies are often called special interest groups (SIGs). When they occur outside an organizational umbrella, you can call them whatever you want to call them.
Here are some ways you can identify or form a study group:
Use email to contact other students in your area who are studying for the same exam. Start a conversation on that topic and try to identify who's really serious about prepping for that exam.
Post a notice at a local community college, four-year college, or university to solicit interest in forming a study group. Academic institutions are full of students, and they spend lots of time prepping for exams anyway. Why not recruit a certification study group from the same organization?
Ask around at local training centers, computer stores, and vendor-sponsored seminars. (Hint: A Microsoft seminar on Windows 2000 is a great place to prospect for potential study group members.)
Join any of a growing number of online certification-related Web communities. www.cramsession.com is an excellent example of this genre; it runs ongoing discussion groups for numerous certification exams day in, day out.
By now, you've probably got the idea that there are lots of ways to find other people like you who not only want to tackle some particular exam but also believe that there's safety—and value—in numbers.
One final hint: In a group, you can agree on a common set of study materials and practice exams. Then you can divide up the exam objectives and assign individuals to cover specific subtopics or areas. Everyone can share the results, but no one has to spend as much time outlining the objectives.
When it comes to preparing yourself for an exam encounter, nothing beats a good practice exam. By putting yourself into the exam situation and tackling questions designed to get you ready for the real thing, you gain two profound advantages:
You desensitize yourself to the anxieties that taking exams can create.
You give yourself the opportunity to check what you've been learning against a set of questions designed to stretch your knowledge to its limit.
The first item helps you concentrate on what you're reading and what you know when you finally get into the hot seat at a testing center. The second item forces you to apply your knowledge to specific scenarios, problems, issues, and factual questions. You need to be able to do all this to do well on any certification exam.
Note
One of the most serious strategic errors certification candidates can make when using practice exams to prepare for an exam is to take those practice exams repeatedly until they regularly achieve a passing score. Memorizing a practice exam rarely leads to success on an actual exam; carry-over from this technique applies only to those questions that are substantially the same on both the practice and real exams. Because the questions on two exams are unlikely to be this similar, practice exams are best used right at the beginning and then again near the end the exam preparation process. You should use the practice exams at the beginning to assess your current level of knowledge and skill and then use them again in the week before you plan to take the real exam to find any “gotcha” areas on which you need additional study, practice, or reading.
Oodles of vendors offer practice tests on certification subjects of all kinds. You can purchase these tests on CD-ROM or disk, or you can download them from the vendor's Web site. They vary in format, from simplistic tests comprised of a list of questions and a list of answers to tests that accurately simulate the testing experience. Of course, this variance is also evident in the price. Our advice is to shop around. By doing a simple Internet search, you can find plenty of sites you can turn to for practice, many of which cover multiple topics and offer great value. These are just a few sites to get your exploring started:
www.preplogic.com—. Here you'll find online practice exams for Cisco, CompTIA, and Microsoft.
www.selftestsoftware.com—. This site offers online practice exams for Cisco, CIW, CompTIA, Lotus, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Sun.
www.measureup.com—. This site offers practice tests for CompTIA, HIPPA, Microsoft, and Novell.
www.transcender.com—. Here you'll find practice tests for CompTIA, Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, CIW, Oracle, and Novell.
www.boson.com—. This site offers a plethora of practice tests from nearly every vendor that offers certification.
http://certification.about.com/?once=true&—. This site from the About.com network offers online practice tests for A+, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, CIW, Novell, and Sun.
www.certportal.com—. Here you can find free online tests to help prepare the aspiring MCSE, MCSD, CCIE, CCNA, CNE, and others.
www.cramsession.com—. Here you can find free online training materials to help prepare an aspiring candidate for MCSE, CNE, CCNA, CCNP, and other certifications. You can get great deals on bookstore purchases and practice tests here, too!
We'd be remiss if we left this topic without mentioning www.examcram.com. It has a great certification-oriented Web site and offers access to all kinds of valuable information, but its daily email delivery of a free “Question of the Day” from tons of exams from the Microsoft, Novell, CompTIA, Linux, Cisco, Oracle, and Sun certification programs makes it a killer source for great practice questions for anyone who's pursuing an IT certification. Be sure to check it out when you're looking for questions to practice on. The price is entirely right!
Note
Busy lists offer “digest service,” which means you get one message a day with synopses of all actual messages, so you can pick and choose what you want to read through, rather than having to read everything. When you sign up for mailing lists, you can normally sign up for “all messages” or “digest only.” We suggest that you use the digest to help separate items of interest from other stuff.
Although self study certainly is cheaper than classroom or online training, you might at some point find yourself stumped by subject matter. When that happens, access to an instructor is hard to beat. Also, some people simply learn better in a structured classroom environment than they do on their own.
That's why we strongly urge you to investigate online, in-class, and videotape training offerings for any certification you pursue. You might ultimately decide against buying any kind of training, but you'll benefit from this exercise anyway. That's because many online, classroom, and general-purpose training companies offer valuable certification information on their Web sites as incentives for students to spend money with them. A quick market survey will also give you a pretty good idea of what's available in the training marketplace and how much the various options cost. You should Expect to spend anywhere from $200 to $500 per day for in-class training (it seldom costs more, but it does happen) and anywhere from nothing to $300 a day for online and videotape training.
When it comes to choosing some particular training offering out of the plethora of options available, you need to be smart about your choices. Visiting forums in which such training is discussed online, asking for and obtaining references from previous customers, reading published reviews, auditing classes (whenever possible), and talking to prospective instructors can all provide useful information in helping you to pick classes that will meet your training needs. Whatever methods you choose to select particular offerings, you should be sure to do your homework and make an informed decision rather than a blind guess.
If you ever find yourself completely befuddled by a certification subject and you have to pass the exam to get your certification, consider taking some training to help get you over the hump. Instructors can respond to your questions and can often restate information in terms you can understand when the training or reading materials don't tell you what you need to know. This can happen quite spontaneously in the classroom, but don't discount the value of online training. Most online training companies offer chat rooms where you can interact with other students, hold regular online “office hours” with instructors, and provide email support to their students. Either live or online, you can get additional help and interaction when you go the training route.
Another benefit that certification training can deliver is access to a unique set of materials. Most in-class and online training classes include printed student handbooks or work from textbooks of one kind or another. This information will not only help you follow along in class but also provide another source of review (and objectives outlining) as you prepare to take your exams.
Access to instructors is rightfully touted as one of the best benefits of certification training because it gives you the opportunity to ask an expert just about anything you want—as long as it's relevant to the topic at hand. Many instructors provide their email addresses to their students and can continue to function as technical resources long after a class is over.
Other places to go trolling for expertise include user group meetings (where vendor, organization, or third-party experts often appear as featured speakers) and certification- or training-oriented mailing lists, newsletters, newsgroups, and Web sites. Ed Tittel answers an average of 100 questions a week, arising from newsletter columns, Web site articles, and so on. Numerous other certification experts are also available through the same channels. In addition, instant messaging applications such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC), AOL Instant Messenger, and MSN Messenger Service, as well as online bulletin boards, are good places to interact with experts.
Publishers like to make their authors available at online bookstores and even through their own Web sites to participate in topical chats. If you keep your eyes on your favorite book Web sites for publishers such as Que Certification, Wiley, Sybex, and New Riders, you'll occasionally get opportunities to ask people who have written books on your topic of interest some questions. You have to be able to type reasonably well to chat effectively online, but hey, the help is free—and often quite valuable. Give it a try!
On-the-job experience is the best method to learn firsthand how things work, but it's not always readily available. There are plenty of other ways to get hands-on experience. For example, you might build a lab at home. Such a lab doesn't have to be expensive, and cost-cutting measures include renting lab equipment, finding an online lab, and forming a study group and having everyone bring lab components.
It is also possible to gain real-world experience through volunteer work for schools, libraries, or other nonprofit agencies. Most nonprofit and government-funded organizations welcome volunteers and interns, and they offer flexible schedules and other perks in exchange for free technical services.
As this and other certification-oriented books readily attest, the online world is a treasure trove of information (believe us, you don't even want to count all the URLs and other online pointers in this book, unless you plan to visit them all). The online world is ready to give you some real pearls of wisdom and experience—in most cases, all you have to do is ask for them! Of course, knowing who (and where) to ask for help can be tricky at times, but if you ask those “virtual neighbors” who have the right knowledge base for help or support, it will usually be forthcoming.
For any given area of certification, there are four kinds of online resources that are worth investigating for access to an active community of involved users and, thus, for access to the information, advice, opinions, and experience they can bring to bear on your problems or questions:
Mailing lists—. No matter what the certification topic, it's likely that you can find multiple mailing lists that cover that topic. To find them, check around vendor Web sites, use your favorite search engine (a search string such as MCSE and mailing list works pretty well), ask your study or user groups, and keep your eyes open while you're online. These things are everywhere, and they are completely geared to a question-and-answer kind of dialogue. In many cases, you can get answers to technical or certification questions faster on a busy mailing list than from a vendor technical support operation!
Newsletters—. Most of the certification experts—such as Certification Magazine and MCP Magazine—regularly email newsletters to opt-in readers. So do lots of vendors; for example, Sunbelt Software is a purveyor of Windows software, but it also sends terrific weekly MCSE and Windows administration newsletters.
Some newsletters are weekly, others semimonthly, and others monthly. They can be great sources of pointers to all kinds of information and often post email addresses where you can send your questions. What's more, because newsletters are always looking for newsworthy items and trying to help their readers find the “good stuff” for certifications, they often include pointers to the best mailing lists, newsgroups, and Web sites in their topic areas.
To learn more about some of the specific newsletters mentioned here, visit these URLs:
Newsgroups—. Most newsgroups belong to the Usenet hierarchy, which includes more than 80,000 newsgroups today. For these newsgroups, you can ask your ISP to furnish an electronic list of the newsgroups that it carries and search that file for vendor or organization names or certification acronyms.
Newsgroups outside the Usenet hierarchy are private, supplied by newsfeeds from vendors or organizations. These newsgroups are usually short enough to scan for items of interest. For example, Microsoft operates a newsfeed at
microsoft.public news.com(to sign up, you enter this name as the root server in your newsreader or news://msnews.microsoft.com in your Web browser). Newsgroups of interest in its list of newsgroups include keywords such as cert, MCSE, and exam. You can also search archived Usenet discussions for certification information at http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/deja_announcement.html (formerly the www.deja.com site).Web sites—. Web sites come in so many forms that we'll cut to the chase and say that here we're talking about Web sites where certification is an active topic of interest and discussion and where you can ask certification or technical questions and get answers. This rules out a lot of Web sites but leaves in many training and certification sites. Don't forget to check out Web sites of vendors that offer training, technical support, certification products or services, and the like. Many of them will help you find answers to your questions or at least help you find other online resources where you can get them answered.
Some of our favorite certification-related Web sites include the following:
Exam Cram 2—. www.examcram.com
InformIT—. www.informit.com
CramSession—. www.cramsession.com
Inside Technology Training—. www.trainingsupersite.com/ittrain/home.htm
Institute for Network Professionals—. www.inpnet.org
TechRepublic—. www.techrepublic.com
If you can't find anything that you can use at these sites, don't worry; there are thousands more to choose from!
When you're chasing information about certification programs, don't forget to go to the source—that is, to the Web site for the vendor or organization that sponsors the certification. In addition to the official line on the certification program, a surprising number of these sites act as clearinghouses for third-party information, particularly when vendors create official partnerships for things such as training, practice exams, study guides, and other ancillary certification-related materials.
Before you go looking for certification information anywhere else (and you'll probably want to do that), make sure that you investigate the sponsor's certification pages with great attention and care. In most cases, you'll find most of what you need to get started on a certification, and in some cases, you can find everything you need.
Here's a list of the kinds of things you should be able to investigate at any sponsor's certification site (you might not be able to find all these things, but you should be able to find most of them):
Program description—. Begin by reading the sponsor's description of its certification program or programs. Try to find answers for questions such as these: What does the program certify? What kind of people are qualified? How can a person participate? Make sure that you get the big picture.
Certification description—. Attack the sponsor's description of the certification you want to pursue. Make sure you understand how many exams might be involved, the order in which they're best taken, how much the exams cost, and the other basic items covered in this book. If what you find at the Web site differs from what this book says, the Web site's information is likely to be right (the sponsor can update the Web content whenever they want, whereas once this book is in print, it never changes again).
Exam information and objectives—. As you dig into any certification, you need to understand the topics and coverage related to the exams you must pass to obtain that credential. Make sure that you locate the exam objectives and use them as you study and practice for the real thing. Make sure that the exam you're tackling isn't about to be retired and that you're working on a certification that isn't about to retire.
Current news and events—. Things change all the time in the IT industry; that's why certification programs are always in flux. Be sure to check the sponsor's news stories, program updates, and other reporting on recent changes, additions, and retirements in the certification area. This kind of information can help you create a plan of attack for any certification and can help you decide when your plans must change.
Exam status and retirements—. Because exams are so important to certification, they usually get their own news area, where beta exams are announced, changes to current exams are documented, and retirements for aging exams are disclosed. As you form your certification strategy, be sure to locate and consider this information as you develop your plan of attack. Note also that reading beta exam announcements is a great way to get a preview of coming certification attractions, even if you have no intention of ever taking a beta exam.
Pointers to resources—. Certification sponsors often provide on their Web sites pointers to all kinds of resources related to their certification programs. These resources can include things such as detailed discussions of prerequisites for certifications, recommended reading lists for preparing for certifications or individual exams, free sample practice exams, white papers and training materials, and much more. Although you can't find all these things on too many certification Web sites, all of them are potentially valuable. Thus, if you find only some, your efforts will still be rewarded.
Partnerships for training, exams, and publications—. Certifications spawn partnerships like salmon on a run up their home stretch of river. Investigating such partnerships on the sponsor's Web site is a great way to find out about training courses in the classroom, online, or on CD (CD-based training may sometimes be called CBT, or computer-based training). It's also a great way to find out who the best practice test vendors are and where to get such exams.
Also, many certification programs spawn official presses (such as Microsoft Press, Novell Press, and Cisco Press). Sponsors are always glad to let you know about such programs because they usually get a cut of the proceeds when you buy the books. Particularly for less popular certification programs, such relationships can be a real boon because they help ensure that documentation on the program, exams, and training materials will be widely available.
While you're investigating these partnerships, don't forget to visit the partner Web sites. In many cases, you'll discover that these vendors offer Web site links, newsletters, or mailing lists where you can take advantage of some of the community spirit and support mentioned earlier in this chapter.
Taking exams—. Because so many certification sponsors use third-party companies such as Prometric or VUE to administer their exams, you should check the sponsor's Web site to figure out where to go to sign up for the exams. You will probably end up heading to www.2test.com (Prometric) or www.vue.com (VUE), where you can get the straight scoop on how to sign up for exams, how to pay for exams, how to locate a testing center, and when you can take whatever specific exam you have prepared for.
In the final analysis, you'll get out of your IT certifications what you put into them. If you're just trying to fill some check boxes or get your ticket punched, you're almost guaranteed to get less out of the process than if you genuinely try to increase your knowledge, skills, and understanding of the way things work in your world and in the workplace. Lifelong learning is a buzzword that denotes ongoing needs for training and education for professionals in all walks of life; in the IT business, lifelong learning is a force to which all of us must adapt or submit—or wind up obsolete!