Category Archives: Training

Practice Until You Can’t Get It Wrong

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One of the things that I spend a lot of my time doing it teaching and training. Not the deeply technical stuff like any one of training programs out there or even the legion of folks that are doing entry-level education on sites like Youtube. Instead, I spend a lot of my time bringing new technologies to the fore and discussing how they impact everyone. I also spend a lot of time with youth and teaching them skills.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that it’s important to not only learn something but to reinforce it as well. How much we practice is just as important as how we learn. We’re all a little guilty of doing things just enough to be proficient without truly mastering a skill.

Hours of Fun

You may have heard of the rule proposed by Malcolm Gladwell that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. There’s been a lot of research debunking this “rule of thumb”. In fact it turns out that the way you practice and your predisposition to how you learn has a lot do to with the process as well.

When I’m teaching youth, I see them start a new skill and keep going until they get their first success. It could be tying a knot or setting up a tent or some other basic skill. Usually, with whatever it is, they get it right and then decide they are proficient in the skill. And that’s the end of it until they need to be tested on it or something forces them to use it later.

For me, the proficiency aspect of basic skills is maddening. We teach people to do things like tying knots or programming switch ports but we don’t encourage them to keep practicing. We accept that proficiency is enough. Worse yet, we hope that the way they will gain expertise is by repetition of the skill. We don’t set the expectation of continued practice.

That’s where the offhanded Gladwell comment above really comes from. The length of time may have been completely arbitrary but the reality is that you can’t really master something until you’ve done it enough that the skill becomes second nature. Imagine someone riding a bicycle for the first time. If they stopped when they were able to pedal the bike they’d never be able to ride it well enough to maneuver in traffic.

Likewise, we can’t rely on simple proficiency for other tasks either. If we just accept that an operations person just learns VLAN configuration once and then we hope they’ll know it well enough that they can do it again later we’re going to either be frustrated when they have to keep looking up the commands for the task or, worse yet, when they bring down the network because they didn’t remember that you needed to use the add keyword on a trunk port and they wipe out a chunk of the network core.

Right vs. Wrong

For all those reasons above I ask my students to take things a little further. Rather than just doing something until you have an initial success I ask them to practice until they have it ingrained into their motor pathways. Put more simply:

Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.

The shift in thinking helps people understand the importance of repeated practice. Getting it right is one thing. Understanding all the possible ways something can be done or every conceivable situation is something entirely different. Sure, you can configure a VLAN. Can you do it on every switch? Do you know what order the commands need to be done in? What happens if you switch them? Do you know what happens when you enable two contradictory features?

Obviously there are things you’re not going to need to practice this much all the time. One of my favorites is the people in CCIE study groups that spend way more time working on things like BGP leak maps or the various ways that one could configure QOS on a frame relay circuit. Are these important things to know? Yes. Are they more important to know than basic layer 2/3 protocols or the interactions of OSPF and BGP when redistributing? No.

Tom’s Take

When I was younger, I watched the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. One of the episodes featured Winston asking Egon if he could read Summerian. His response? “In my sleep, underwater, and in the dark. Of course I can read Summerian.”

Practice the basics until you understand them. Don’t miss a beat and make sure you have what you need. But don’t stop there. Keep going until you can’t possibly forget how to do something. That’s how you know you’ve mastered it. In your sleep, underwater, and in dark. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.

Knowledge is Powerful and Needs to Be Shared

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WritingPen

A tweet this morning from my friend Stephanie stood out in my timeline because she’s talking about something I’ve seen happen over and over again in my lifetime:

How many times have we seen this in our organizations? People want to hoard knowledge because they feel like it’s power. Maybe they’re worried that if anyone knew what they know it would mean they could get fired. Perhaps they enjoy holding the keys to the kingdom and not allowing anyone else to do something or know something they know. It could even be that they like the idea of mystery in the air and not allowing people to know the whole truth keeps things alive, as the founders of Coca-Cola and Colonel Sanders will happily tell you.

Over the years I’ve figured out that hoarding knowledge leads to ruin. I’ve been involved in so many scenarios were a lack of knowledge sharing ended up causing the kinds of problems that were easily avoidable if someone had just committed what they knew to memory. It wasn’t always malicious either. There is a lot of information that people collect incidentally and just flat out forget to write down until it’s too late.

The first time I truly realized how important good documentation was happened on a sad day in my career. My mentor, Wes Williams, tragically passed away during an otherwise uneventful workday during lunch. I wasn’t there but our office got the news shortly thereafter and we were stunned. No one in the office was even thinking about anything other than how tragic it was and how we were going to miss him. Eventually, one of the other engineers stood up and asked, “Does anyone know the password to Wes’s laptop?” We realized that Wes had a ton of knowledge about his clients and other operational things saved on his laptop, which was sitting unlocked on his desk. We rushed to keep it from going to sleep and to make sure that we changed the password to something we all knew. After that, the tedious process of copying all his data to a shared location began. Wes didn’t think to save it all somewhere else because he didn’t know he would need to until it was too late.

Information Is Currency

Since then I’ve tried very hard to share the knowledge that I have so that everyone benefits. The cynics in the organization may see information as a kind of currency to trade power. If you have to come to them to get the answers then they are important in the grand scheme of things. Kind of like a power broker of sorts.

My outlook is different. Having the knowledge written down somewhere means someone can learn what they need and do the job without needing to get me involved. Maybe they have other questions or need further explanation. That’s a great time to engage me. But I don’t need to be a gatekeeper for the basics or feel like I have to hoard it all to myself.

If you think that hoarding knowledge makes you impervious to firing or reassignment, you need to be careful with your hubris. No one is immune from reductions. External factors can limit your involvement with your career or organization before you know it. We use the idea of the “hit by a bus” test to explain how knowledge needs to be shared in the event of a sudden thing like the issue I mentioned above. But what if the situation develops slowly and you get caught up before realizing it’s too late to share what you know?

Power Corrupts

If you’re the person in the company that always calls the ISP to report outages because you know exactly how to navigate the automated trouble ticket system you have value. However, if you never write that down for your team members you’re going to limit your mobility out of your job. No matter how high you climb it will always be your responsibility. Worse yet, if you find yourself in a place where you can’t communicate what you know and someone else has to figure it out on their own your so-called “power” is useless now.

Information is a strange form of power because it loses all it’s inherent value as soon as it’s shared. If I know who the next supervisor is going to be before anyone else then I only have power as long as no one else knows. As soon as someone finds out I no longer control that information and therefore it’s useless. Instead of hoarding knowledge and information to wield as a cudgel to lord over others you should share it freely to ensure it’s not lost. How many advances in human history have been lost because no one wrote them down?

Knowing how something works isn’t a tool you should use to extract further value at the expense of capability. Even if the knowledge is something that shouldn’t be shared for reasons related to secrecy you still need to let people know there is a purpose and they either don’t need to know right now or it’s something that will be available to others. There are many times when I’ve been told that a decision-making process exists and I don’t need to understand it right now. I’m fine with that just so long as it’s written down somewhere. If it’s not then we may all find ourselves recreating a process that was a solved issue simply because someone took the secrets of how it worked with them when they moved on to a different role or out of the organization entirely.

Tom’s Take

There are times when I have to keep things secret. I know something and it’s not time to reveal it. But processes or knowledge about basic things should never fall into that category. It’s one thing to know that your supervisor is being promoted to section leader next week. It’s entirely different to hoard the knowledge of how the factory wireless network is configured because you are afraid if you don’t you’ll get fired. Commit every piece of knowledge you can to paper, physical or virtual, while you can. You never know when someone will need to know what you know. Knowledge is only valuable as currency when it’s shared. And that’s the kind of power that makes you valuable to us all.

Fast Friday Thoughts from the Woods

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I’m at camp this week helping put on the second weekend of the Last Frontier Council Wood Badge course which is my idea of a vacation. I’m learning a lot, teaching a lot more, and having fun. But that does’t mean I’m not working too. Lots of fun conversations that make me recall the way people consume information, communicate what they know, and all too often overlook the important things they take for granted.

  • Why is IT one of the few disciplines that expects people to come in fully trained and do the job instead of learning while doing it? Is that because hiring managers don’t want to train people? Or is it because senior people are less likely to impart knowledge to protect their jobs? I don’t have a good answer but I know what the result looks like and it’s not something that’s positive, either for the people doing the job or how it’s perceived outside of IT.
  • There is a ton of value in doing something for real instead of just planning it and calling it good. DR plans need to be tested. Network changes need to be mocked up. No matter what kind of critical thing you’ll be doing you need to try it for real instead of just putting it on paper and hoping that it works. In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
  • Don’t forget to commit your knowledge to paper at some point in your career. You may know everything under the sun but when you’re not available you will be missed. You know more than you realize and you need to make sure that others benefit from what you’re capable of helping with. Those that hold the knowledge only have the power when they share it. Keeping it to yourself only hurts those that can benefit. Use your currency effectively.

Tom’s Take

These questions don’t have answers. They are designed to make you think about how you do things and what you can do to leave a legacy for the people that come behind you. Don’t be the story that everyone tells about that guy they hated. Be the inspiration for those that want to be like you in the future.

Why Is The CCIE Lab Moving?

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Cisco confirmed big CCIE rumor this week that the RTP lab was going to be moved to Richardson, TX.

The language Cisco used is pretty neutral. San Jose and RTP are being shut down as full time lab locations and everyone is moving to Richardson. We knew about this thanks to the detective work of Jeff Fry, who managed to figure this out over a week ago. Now that we know what is happening, why is it coming to pass?

They Don’t Build Them Like They Used To

Real estate is expensive. Anyone that’s ever bought a house will tell you that. Now, imagine that on a commercial scale. Many companies will get the minimum amount of building that they need to get by. Sometimes they’re bursting at the seams before they upgrade to a new facility.

Other companies are big about having lots of area. These are the companies that have giant campuses. Companies like Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, and NetApp have multiple buildings spread across a wide area. It makes sense to do this when you’re a large company that needs the room to spread out. In Cisco’s case, each business unit had their own real estate. Wireless was in one building. Firewalls in another. Each part of the company had their own area to play in.

Cisco was a real estate maven for a while. They built out in anticipation of business. There was a story years ago of a buried concrete slab foundation in Richardson that was just waiting for the next big Cisco product to be developed so they could clear away the dirt and start construction. But, why not just build the building and be done with it?

Remember how I said that real estate is expensive? That expense doesn’t come completely from purchases. It comes from operations. You need to have utilities for the building. You need to have services for the building. You need to pay taxes on the building. And those things happen all the time. Even if you never have anyone in the building the electricity is still running. That’s one of the reasons why Cisco shuts down their offices between Christmas and New Year’s every year. And the taxes are still due. Hence the reason why the foundation in Richardson was buried.

Real estate is also not an infinite resource. Anyone that’s been to Silicon Valley knows that. They’re running out of room in the South Bay. And building the new 49ers stadium on the corner of Tasman Drive and Great America Parkway didn’t help either. Sports teams are as hungry for real estate as tech companies. The support structures that cropped up for the stadium ended up buying the Letter Buildings from Cisco, which is why the lab was moved from Building C to Building L years ago.

Home Is Where The Work Is

The other shifting demographic is that more workers are remote in today’s environment. A combination of factors have led people to be just as productive from their home office as their open-plan cubicle. Increased collaboration software coupled with changing job requirements means that people don’t have to go to their desk every day to be productive.

This is especially true now that companies like Cisco are putting more of a focus on software instead of hardware. In the good old days of hardware dominance you needed to go into the office to work on your chipset diagrams. You needed your desktop CAD program to draw the silicon traces on a switch. And you needed to visit the assembly lines and warehouses to see that everything was in order.

Today? It’s all code. Everything is written in an IDE and stored on a powerful laptop. You can work from anywhere. A green space outside your office window. A coffee shop. Your living room. The possibilities are endless. But that also means that you don’t need a permanent office desk. And if you don’t need a desk that means your company doesn’t need to pay for you to have one.

Now, instead of bustling buildings full of people working in their shared offices there are acres of empty open-plan cubicle farms lying fallow. People would rather work from Starbucks than go to the office. People would rather work in their pajamas than toil away in a cube. And so companies like Cisco are paying taxes and utilities for open spaces that don’t have anyone while the offices around the perimeter are filled with managers that are leading people that they don’t see.

CCIE Real Estate

But what does this all mean for the lab? Well, Cisco needs to downsize their big buildings in high-value real estate markets. They’re selling off buildings in San Jose as fast as the NFL will buy them. They are downsizing the workforce in RTP as well. The first hint of the CCIE move was David Blair trying to find a new job. As real estate becomes more and more costly to obtain, Cisco is going to need to expand in less expensive markets. The Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) area is still one of the cheapest in the country.

DFW is also right in the middle of the country. It’s pretty much the same distance from everything. So people that don’t want to schedule a mobile lab can fly to Richardson and take the test there. RTP and San Jose are being transitioned to mobile lab facilities, which means people that live close to those areas can still take the test, just not on the schedule they may like. This allows Cisco to free up the space in those buildings for other purposes and consolidate their workforce down to areas that require less maintenance. They can also sell off unneeded buildings to other companies and take the profits for reinvestment in other places. Cutting costs and making money is what real estate is all about, even if you aren’t a real estate developer.

Tom’s Take

I’m sad to see the labs moving out of RTP and San Jose. Cisco has said they are going to frame the famous Wall of Pain in RTP as a tribute to the lab takers there. I have some fond memories of San Jose as well, but even those memories are from a building that Cisco doesn’t own any longer. The new reality of a software defined Cisco is that there isn’t as much of a need for real estate any more. People want to work remotely and not live in a cube farm. And when people don’t want an office, you don’t need to keep paying for them to have one. Cisco won’t be shutting everything down any time soon, but the CCIE labs are just the first part of a bigger strategy.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post accidentally referred to David Mallory instead of David Blair. This error has been corrected.

Is Training The Enemy of Progress?

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Peyton Maynard-Koran was the keynote speaker at InteropITX this year. If you want to catch the video, check this out:

Readers of my blog my remember that Peyton and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a few things. Last year I even wrote up some thoughts about vendors and VARs that were a direct counterpoint to many of the things that have been said. It has even gone further with a post from Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) about the intelligence level of the average enterprise IT customer. I want to take a few moments and explore one piece of this puzzle that keeps being brought up: You.

Protein Robots

You are a critical piece of the IT puzzle. Why? You’re a thinking person. You can intuit facts and extrapolate cause from nothing. You are NI – natural intelligence. There’s an entire industry of programmers chasing what you have. They are trying to build it into everything that blinks or runs code. The first time that any company has a real breakthrough in true artificial intelligence (AI) beyond complicated regression models will be a watershed day for us all.

However, you are also the problem. You have requirements. You need a salary. You need vacation time. You need benefits and work/life balance to keep your loved ones happy. You sometimes don’t pick up the phone at 3am when the data center blinks out of existence. It’s a challenge to get you what you need while still extracting the value that is needed from you.

Another awesome friend Andrew von Nagy (@RevolutionWiFi) coined the term “protein robots”. That’s basically what we are. Meatbags. Walking brains that solve problems that cause BGP to fall over when presented with the wrong routing info or cause wireless signals to dissipate into thing air. We’re a necessary part of the IT equation.

Sure, people are trying to replace us with automation and orchestration. It’s the most common complaint about SDN that I’ve heard to date: automation is going to steal my job. I’ve railed against that for years in my talks. Automation isn’t going to steal your job, but it will get you a better one. It will get you a place in the organization to direct and delegate and not debug and destroy. In the end, automation isn’t coming for your job as long as you’re trying to get a better one.

All Aboard The Train!

The unseen force that’s opposing upward mobility is training. In order to get a better job, you need to be properly trained to do it. Maybe it’s a lot of experience from running a network for years. Perhaps it’s a training class you get to go to or a presentation online you can watch. No matter what you need to have new skills to handle new job responsibilities. Even if you’re breaking new ground in something like AI development you’re still acquiring new skills along the way. Hopefully, if you’re in a new field, you’re writing them all down for people to follow in your footsteps one day.

However, training is in opposition to what your employer wants for you. It sounds silly, doesn’t it? Yet, we still hear the quote attributed to W. Edwards Deming – “What happens if we train our people and they leave? What happens if we don’t and they stay?” Remember, as we said above you are a protein robot that needs things like time off and benefits. All of those things are seen as an investment in you.

Training is another investment that companies like to tout. When I worked at a VAR, we considered ourselves some of the most highly trained people around. The owner told me when I started that he was “going to put half a million dollars into training me.” When I asked him about that number after five years he told me it felt like he put a kid through college. And that was before my CCIE. The more trained people you have, the easier your job becomes.

But an investment in training can also backfire. Professionals can take that training and put it to use elsewhere. They can go to a different job and take more money. They can refuse to do a job until they are properly trained. The investments that people make in training are often unrealized relative to the amount of money that it costs to make it happen.

It doesn’t help that training prices have skyrocketed. It used to be that I just needed to go down to the local bookstore and find a copy of a CCNA study guide to get certified. I knew I’d reached a new point in my career when I couldn’t buy my books at the bookstore. Instead, I had to seek out the knowledge that I needed elsewhere. And yes, sometimes that knowledge came in the form of bootcamps that cost thousands of dollars. Lucky for me that my employer at the time looked at that investment and said that it was something they would pick up. But I know plenty of folks that can’t get that kind of consideration. Especially when the training budget for the whole department won’t cover one VMware ICM class.

Employers don’t want employees to be too trained. Because you have legs. Because you can get fed up. Because you can leave. The nice thing about making investments in hardware and software is that it’s stuck at a location. A switch is an asset. A license for a feature can’t be transferred. Objects are tied to the company. And their investments can be realized and recovered. Through deprecation or listing as an asset with competitive advantage companies can recover the value they put into a physical thing.

Professionals, on the other hand, aren’t as easy to deal with. Sure, you can list a CCIE as an important part of your business. But what happens if they leave? What happens when they decide they need a raise? Or, worse yet, when they need to spend six months studying for a recertification? The time taken to learn things is often not factored into the equation when we discuss how much training costs. Some of my old coworkers outright refused to get certified if they had to study on their own time. They didn’t want their free non-work time taken up by reading over MCSE books or CCNA guides. Likewise, the company didn’t want to waste billable hours from someone not providing value. It was a huge catch-22.

Running In Place

Your value is in your skillset at the company you work for. They derive that value from you. So, they want you to stay where you are. They want you trained just enough to do your job. They don’t want you to have your own skillset that could be valuable before they get their value from you. And they definitely don’t want you to take your skillset to a competitor. How can you fix that?

  1. Don’t rely on your company to pay for your training. There are a lot of great resources out there that you can use to learn without needed to drop big bucks for a bootcamp. Use bootcamps to solidify your learning after the fact. Honestly, if you’re in a bootcamp to learn something you’re in the wrong class. Read blogs. Buy books from Amazon. Get your skills the old fashioned way.
  2. Be ready to invest time. Your company doesn’t want you using their billable time for learning. So that means you are going to make an investment instead. The best part is that even an hour of studying instead of binge watching another episode of House is time well-spent on getting another important skill. And if it happened on your own time, you’re not going to have to pay that back.
  3. Be ready to be uncomfortable. It’s going to happen. You’re going to feel lost when you learn something new. You’re going to make mistakes while you’re practicing it. And, honestly, you’re going to feel uncomfortable going to your boss to ask for more money once you’re really good at what you’re doing. If you’re totally comfortable when learning something new, you’re doing it wrong.

Tom’s Take

Companies want protein robots. They want workers that give 125% at all times and can offer a wide variety of skills. They want compliant workers that never want to go anywhere else. Don’t be that robot. Push back. Learn what you can on your time. Be an asset but not an immobile one. You need to know more to escape the SDN Langoliers that are trying to eat your job. That means you need to be on the move to get where you need to be. And if you sit still you risk becoming a permanent asset. Just like the hardware you work on.

It’s Time For Security Apprenticeships

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Breaking into an industry isn’t easy. When you look at the amount of material that is necessary to learn IT skills it can be daunting and overwhelming. Don’t let the for-profit trade school ads fool you. You can’t go from ditch digger to computer engineer in just a few months. It takes time and knowledge to get there.

However, there is one concept in non-technical job roles that feels very appropriate to how we do IT training, specifically for security. And that’s the apprenticeship.

Building For The Future

Apprenticeship is a standard for electricians and carpenters. It’s the way that we train new people to do the work of the existing workforce. It requires time and effort and a lot of training. But, it also fixes several problems with the current trend of IT certification:

  1. You Can’t Get a Job Without Experience – Far too often we see people getting rejected for jobs at the entry level because they have no experience. But how are they supposed to get the experience without doing the job? IT roles paradoxically require you to be cheap enough to hire for nothing but expect you to do the job on day one. Apprenticeships fix this by showing that you’re willing to do the job and get trained at the same time. That way you can be properly trained on the job.
  2. You Need To Be Certified – Coupled tightly with the first problem is the certification trend. Yes, electricians and plumbers are certified to do the work. After 5 years of training. You don’t get to take a test after 3 months and earn Journeyman status. You have to earn it through training and work. It also ensures that every journeyman out there has the same basic level of work experience and training. Compare that with people getting a CCNA right out of college with no experience on devices or a desktop administrator position having an MCSE-level requirement to discourage people from applying.
  3. You Can’t Find a Mentor – This is a huge issue for entry-level positions. The people you work with are often so overtasked with work that they don’t have time to speak to you, let alone show you the ropes. By defining the role of the apprentice and the journeyman trainer, you can ensure that the mentoring relationship exists and is reinforced constantly through the training period. You don’t get through an apprenticeship in a vacuum.
  4. You Can’t Get Paid To Learn – This is another huge issue with IT positions. Employers don’t want to pay to train you. They want you to use the vast powers of the Internet to look up hacks on Stack Overflow and paste them into production equipment rather than buying a book for you or letting you take a class. Some employers are better than others about highly skilled workers, but those employers are usually leveraging those skills to make more money, like in a VAR or MSP. Apprenticeships fix this problem by including a classroom component in the program. You spend time in a classroom every other week while you’re doing the work.

Securing the Future

The apprenticeship benefits above go double for security-related professions. Whereas there is a lot of material to train networking and storage admins, security is more of a game of cat-and-mouse. As new protections are developed, we must always figure out of the old protections are still useful. We need to train people how to learn. We need to bring them up to speed on what works and what doesn’t and why googling for an old article about packet filtering firewalls isn’t as relevant in 2018 as it was a decade ago.

More than that, we need to get the security practitioners to a place where they can teach effectively and mentor people. We need to get away from the idea of just rattling off a long list of recommended protections to people as the way to train them about security. We need to make sure we’re teaching fundamentals and proper procedures. And they only way that can happen is with someone that has the time and motivation to learn. Like an apprentice.

This would also have the added luxury of ensure the next generation of security practitioners learns the pitfalls before they make mistakes that compromise the integrity of the data they’re protecting. Making a mistake in security usually means someone finding out something they aren’t supposed to know. Or data getting stolen and used for illicit means. By using apprenticeships as a way for people to grow, you can quickly bring people up to speed in a safe environment without worrying that their decisions will lead to problems with no one to check their work.

Tom’s Take

I got lucky in my IT career. I worked with two mentors that spent the time to train me like an apprentice. They showed me the ropes and made sure I learned things the right way. And I became successful because of their leadership. Today, I don’t see that mentality. I see people covering their own jobs or worried that they’re training a replacement instead of a valued team member. I worry that we’re turning out a generation of security, networking, and storage professionals that won’t have the benefit of knowing what to do beyond Google searches and won’t know how to teach the coming generation how to deal with the problems they face. It’s not too late to start by taking an apprentice under your wing today.

What Happened To The CCDE?

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Studying for a big exam takes time and effort. I spent the better part of 3 years trying to get my CCIE with constant study and many, many attempts. And I was lucky that the CCIE Routing and Switching exam is offered 5 days a week across multiple sites in the world. But what happens when the rug gets pulled out from under your feet?

Not Appearing In This Testing Center

The Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) is a very difficult exam. It takes all of the technical knowledge of the CCIE and bends it in a new direction. There are fun new twists like requirements determination, staged word problems, and whole new ways to make a practical design exam. Russ White made a monster of a thing all those years ago and the team that continues to build on the exam has set a pretty high bar for quality. So high, in fact, that gaining the coveted CCDE number with its unique styling is a huge deal for the majority of people I know that have it, even those with multiple CCIEs.

The CCDE is also only offered 3-4 times a year. The testing centers are specialized Pearson centers that can offer enhanced security. You don’t have to fly to RTP or San Jose for your exam, but you can’t exactly take it at the local community college either. It’s the kind of thing that you work toward and get ready for, not the kind of spur-of-the-moment sales test that you have to take today to certify on a new product.

So, what happens if the test gets canceled? Because that’s exactly what happened two weeks ago. All those signed up to take the May 17, 2017 edition of the exam were giving one week’s notice that the exam had been canceled. Confusion reigned everywhere. Why had Cisco done this? What was going to happen? Would it be rescheduled or would these candidates be forced to sit the August exam dates instead? What was going on? This was followed by lots of rumors and suggestions of impropriety.

According to people that should know, the February 2017 exam had a “statistically signification pass rate increase”. For those that don’t know, Cisco tracks the passing exam scores of all their tests. They have people trained in the art of building tests and setting a specific passing rate. And they keep an eye on it. When too many people start passing the exam, it’s a sign that the difficulty needs to be increased. When too few people are able to hit the mark, a decision needs to be made about reducing difficulty or examining why the pass rate is so low. Those are the kinds of decisions that are made every day when the data comes back about tests.

For larger exams like the CCDE and CCIE that have fewer test taking opportunities, the passing rate is a huge deal. If 50% of the people that take the CCIE pass, it doesn’t say very much for the “expert” status of the exam. Likewise, if only 0.5% of test takers pass the CCDE on a given attempt, it’s an indicator that the test is too hard or overly complex and less about skill demonstration and more about being “really, really tough”. The passing rate is a big deal to Cisco.

According to those reports, there was a huge spike in the passing rate for the February CCDE. Big enough to make Cisco shut down the May attempts to find out why. If you have a few percentage points variance in passing or failing rates now and then, it’s not a huge deal. But if you have a huge increase in the number of certified individuals for one of the most challenging exams ever created, you need to find out why. That’s why Cisco went into damage control mode for May and maybe even for August.

The Jenga Problem

So, if your still with me at this point, you’ve probably figured out that there’s a good possibility that someone got their hands on a copy of the CCDE exam. That’s why Cisco had to stop the most recent date in order to ensure that whatever is out in the wild isn’t going to cause issues with the exam passing rates going forward. It makes sense from a test giver perspective to plug the leak and ensure the integrity of the exam.

Yes, it does suck for the people that are taking the exam. That’s a lot of time and effort wasted. One of the things I kept hearing from people was, “Why doesn’t Cisco just change the test?” Sadly, changes to the CCDE are almost impossible at this point in the game.

Even written exams with hundreds of test bank questions are difficult to edit and refresh. I know because I’ve been involved the process for many of them in the past. Getting new things added and old things removed takes time, effort, and cooperation among many people on a team. Imagine the nightmare of trying to get that done for a test where every question is hand-crafted and consists of multiple parts. Where something that is involved in Question 2 of a scenario has an impact on Question 8.

Remember, exams like the CCIE and CCDE are infamous for word choices mattering a lot in the decision making process of the candidate. Changing any of the words is a huge deal. Now, think about having to change a question or two. Or a scenario or two out of four. Or a whole exam revision. Now, do it all in two weeks. You can see what the CCDE team was faced with and why they had to make the decision they did. Paying customers are angry, but the possibility that the integrity of a complicated exam is compromised is worth more to Cisco in the long run.

Tom’s Take

What’s going to happen? It’s difficult to say. Cisco has to find out what happened and stop it immediately. Then, they have to assess what can be done to salvage the exam as it exists today. Scenarios must be created to replace known bad versions. Evaluation of those new scenarios could take a while. And in the interim, Cisco can’t just shut down the testing and certification process. It would be the end of the CCDE and cause a huge backlash in the elite community that exists to spread the good word of Cisco throughout networking circles. Cisco isn’t acting from a position of confusion, but instead from a position of caution. The wrong step at the wrong time could be disastrous.

Mental Case – In a Flash(card)

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You’ve probably noticed that I spend a lot of my time studying for things.  Seems like I’ve always been reading things or memorizing arcane formulae for one reason or another.  In the past, I have relied upon a large number of methods for this purpose.  However, I keep coming back to the tried-and-true flash card.  To me, it’s the most basic form of learning.  A question on the front and an answer on the back is all you need to drill a fact into your head.  As I started studying for my CCIE lab exam, this was the route that I chose to go down when I wanted to learn some of the more difficult features, like BGP supress maps or NTP peer configurations.  It was a pain to hand write all that info out on my cards.  Sometimes it didn’t all fit.  Other times, I couldn’t read my own writing.  I wondered if there was a better solution.

Cue my friend Greg Ferro and his post about a program called Mental Case.  Mental Case, from Mental Faculty, is a program designed to let you create your own flashcards.  The main program runs on a Mac computer and allows you to create libraries of flash cards.  There are a lot of good example sets when you first launch the app for things like languages.  But, as you go through some of the other examples, you can see the power that Mental Case can give you above and beyond a simple 3″x5″ flash card.  For one thing, you can use pictures in your flash cards.  This is handy if you are trying to learn about art or landmarks, for instance.  You could also use it as a quick quiz about Cisco Visio shapes or wireless antenna types.  This is a great way to study things more advanced than just simple text.

Once you dig into Mental Case, though, you can see some of the things that separate it from traditional pen-and-paper.  While it might be handy to have a few flash cards in your pocket to take out and study when you’re in line at the DMV, more often than not you tend to forget about them.  Mental Case can setup a schedule for you to study.  It will pop up and tell you that it’s time to do some work.  That’s great as a constant reminder of what you need to learn.  Another nice feature is the learning feature.  If you have ever used flash cards, you probably know that after a while, you tend to know about 80% of them cold with little effort.  However, there are about 20% that kind of float in the middle of the pack and just get skipped past without much reinforcement.  They kind of get lost in the shuffle, so to speak.  With Mental Case, those questions which you get wrong more often get shuffled to the front, where your attention span is more focused.  Mental Case learns the best ways to make you learn best.  You can also set Mental Case to shuffle or even reverse the card deck to keep you on your toes.

When you couple all of these features with the fact that there is a Mental Case IOS client as well as a desktop version, your study efficiency goes through the roof.  Now, rather than only being able to study your flash cards when you are at your desk, you can take them with you everywhere.  When you consider that most people today spend an awful lot of time staring at their iPhones and iPads, it’s nice to know that you can pull up a set of flash cards from your mobile device and go to town at a moment’s notice, like in the line at the DMV.  In fact, that’s how I got started with Mental Case.  I downloaded the IOS app and started firing out the flash cards for things like changing RIP timers and configuring SSM.  However, the main Mental Case app only runs on Mac.  At the time, I didn’t have a Mac?  How did I do it?  Well, Mental Case seems to have thought of everything.  While the IOS app works best in concert with the Mac app, you can also create flash cards on other sites, like FlashcardExchange and Quizzlet.  You can create decks and make them publicly available for everyone, or just share them among your friends.  You do have to make the deck public long enough to download to Mental Case IOS, but it can be protected again afterwards if you are studying information that shouldn’t be shared with the rest of the world.  Note, though, that the IOS version of the software is a little more basic than the one on the Mac.  It doesn’t support wacky text formatting or the ability to do multiple choice quizzes.  Also, cards that are created with more than two “sides” (Mental Case calls them facets) will only display properly in slideshow mode.  But, if you think of the IOS client as a replacement for the stack of 10,000 flash cards you might already be carrying in your backpack or pocket the limitations aren’t that severe after all.

The latest version of Mental Case now has the option to share content between Macs via iCloud.  This will allow you to keep your deck synced between your different computers.  You still have to sync the cards between your Mac and your IOS device via Wi-Fi.  You can share at shorter ranges over Bluetooth.  You can also create collection of cards known as a Study Archive and place them in a central location, like Dropbox for instance. This wasn’t a feature when I was using Mental Case full time, but I like the idea of being able to keep my cards in one place all the time.

Mental Case is running a special on their software for the next few days.  Normally, the Mac version costs $29.99.  That’s worth every penny if you spend time studying.  However, for the next few days, it’s only $9.99.  This is a steal for such a powerful study program.  The IOS app is also on sale.  Normally $4.99, it’s just $2.99.  Alone the IOS app is a great resource.  Paired with its bigger brother, this is a no-brainer.  Run out and grab these two programs and spend more time studying your facts and figures efficiently and less time creating them.  If you’d like to learn more about Mental Case from Mental Faculty, you can check out their webiste at http://www.mentalcaseapp.com.

Disclaimer

I am a Mental Case IOS user.  I have used the demo version of the Mental Case Mac app.  Mental Case has not contacted me about this review, and no promotional consideration was given.  I’m just a really big fan of the app and wanted to tell people about it.

Study Advice – Listen To That Little Voice

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During Show 109 of the Packet Pushers podcast, I had the unique honor to be involved in an episode that included the uber geek Scott Morris, distinguished Cisco Press author Wendell Odom, and the very first CCDE, Russ White.  Along with Natalie Timms, the CCIE Security program manager and Amy Arnold, we discussed a lot of various topics around the subject of certification.  One of the topics that came up about 37 minutes in was about being persistent in your studies.  Amy brought up a good point that you need to find a study habit that works for you.  I followed up with a comment that I still have a voice in the back of my head that tells me I need to study.  I promised a blog post about that, so here it is only a month late.

I took three years to get my CCIE.  Only the last year really involved intense study on a regular basis.  The previous 24 months, I spent a great deal of time and effort with my regular job.  I picked up a book from time to time and refresh my memory, but I wasn’t doing the kind of heavy duty labbing necessary to hone my CCIE skills.  After I had some conversations with my mentors about what the CCIE really meant to me, I jumped in and started doing as much studying as I could every night.  Almost all of my study time came after my kids went to bed.  Basically, from 8 p.m. until about 1 a.m. I fired up my GNS3 lab and tested various scenarios and brain teasers.  I took me a bit of time before I really settled into a routine, though.  There were lots of things that kept tugging at my attention.  The devilsh Internet, the seductive allure of my television, and the siren call of video games all competed to see which one could lure me away from the warm glow of my console screen.  I had to spend a great deal of time focusing on making a conscious decision to drop what I was doing and start working on my lab.  It’s a lot like running, in a way.  Most runners will tell you that if you can get outside and start running, the rest is easy.  It’s overcoming all the obstacles in your way that are trying to keep you from running.  You have to push past the distractions and keep moving no matter what.  Don’t let an email or a text message keep you from starting R1.  Don’t let a late-night snack run distract you from loading a troubleshooting configuration.  The real key is to get started.  Crack open those lab manuals and fire up your routers, whether they be real or virtual.  After that, the rest just falls into place.

There is a downside to all that training, though.  It’s now been 13 months since I passed my CCIE lab.  To this day, I stil have a little voice in the back of my head telling me that I need to be studying.  Every time I flip on the TV or sit down on the couch, I feel like I should have a book in my lap or have a lab diagram staring me in the face.  I’ve taken some certification tests since the lab, but I haven’t really taken a great deal of time to study something that isn’t familiar to me.  I talked about what I wanted to do at the beginning of the year, and I firmly believe now that I’m halfway through that I’ve missed some opportunities to get back on the horse, as it were.  I know that the only way to satisfy that voice that keeps telling me that I should be doing something is to feed it with chapters of study guides and time in front of the lab console again.  I don’t think it will take the same kind of time investment that the CCIE did, but who knows what it might build into in the end?  I certainly never thought I’d be taking the granddaddy of all certification tests when I first started learning about networking all those many years ago.

For those out there just starting to study for your certifications, I would echo Ethan’s advice during the podcast.  You need to make a habit out of studying.  Many people that I talk to want to study for tests, but they want to do it on someone else’s time.  They want their employer to mark off time for study or provide resources for learning.  While I’m all for this kind of idea and would love to see more employers doing things like this, there is a limit that you will eventually reach.  Your employer expects you to spend your time providing a service for them.  If you truly want to have as much study time as you want, you will have to do it outside working hours.  Your boss doesn’t care what you do from 5 p.m. on.  In the case of the CCIE, it was a whole lot easier for me to try and do mock labs on Saturday than it was to try and do them on Tuesday.  The work week doesn’t afford many uninterrupted opportunities for study.  Nights and weekends do.

Make sure you take your study habits as seriously as you do your job.  It might be easy to kid yourself into thinking that you can just pick up the book for five minutes before the next TV show comes one, but we both know that won’t work.  Unless you immerse yourself in studying, all that knowledge that you gained in those scant minutes of furious reading will evaporate when the theme song to that hit sitcom starts.  You don’t have to have total silence, though.  I find that I do some of my best studying when I have some noise in the background that forces me to pay attention to what I’m doing.  However, if you don’t apply some serious consideration to your studies, you’ll probably end up much like I did in the first couple of years of my studies – adrift and listless.  If you can knuckle down and treat it just like you would a troubleshooting task or an installation project, then you’ll do just fine.

Cisco CoLaboratory – Any Questions? Any Answers?

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Cisco has recently announced the details of their CoLaboratory program for the CCNP certification.  This program is focused on those out there certified as CCNPs with a couple of years of job experience that want to help shape the future of the CCNP certification.  You get to spend eight weeks helping develop a subset of exam questions that may find their way into the question pool for the various CCNP or CCDx tests.  And you’re rewarded for all your hard work with a one-year extension to your current CCNP/CCDx certification.

I got a chance to participate in the CCNA CoLab program a couple of years ago.  I thought it would be pretty easy, right?  I mean, I’ve taken the test.  I know the content forwards and backwards.  How hard could it be to write questions for the test?  Really Hard.  Turns out that there are a lot of things that go into writing a good test question.  Things I never even thought of.  Like ensuring that the candidate doesn’t have a good chance of guessing the answer.  Or getting rid of “all of the above” as an answer choice.  Turns out that most of the time “all of the above” is the choice, it’s the most often picked answer.  Same for “none of the above”.  I spent my eight weeks not only writing good, challenging questions for aspiring network rock stars, but I got a crash course in why the Cisco tests look and read the way they do.  I found a new respect for those people that spend all their time trying to capture the essence of very dry reading material in just a few words and maybe a diagram.

I also found that I’ve become more critical of shoddy test writing.  Not just all/none of the above type stuff either.  How about questions that ask for 3 correct answers and there are only four choices?  There’s a good chance I’ll get that one right even just guessing.  Or one of my favorite questions to make fun of: “Each answer represents a part of the solution.  Choose all correct steps that apply.”  Those questions are not only easy to boil down to quick binary choices, but I hate that often there is one answer that sticks out so plainly that you know it must be the right answer.  Then there’s the old multiple choice standby: when all else fails, pick the longest answer.  I can’t tell you how much time I spent on my question submissions writing “good” bad answers.  There’s a whole methodology that I never knew anything about.  And making sure the longest answer isn’t the right one every time is a lot harder than you might think.

Tom’s Take

In the end, I loved my participation in the Cisco CoLaboratory program.  It gave me a chance to see tests from the other side of the curtain and learn how to better word questions and answers to extract the maximum amount of knowledge from candidates.  If you are at all interested in certifications, or if you’ve ever sat in a certification test and said to yourself, “This question is stupid!  I could write a better question than this.”, you should head over to the Cisco CoLaboratory page and sign up to participate.  That way you get to come up with good questions.  And hopefully better answers.