Two months ago, I heard that 640-801 exams will be expired and Cisco added one more milestone to career path as CCENT. I told my wife about it and she gifted me an exam fee to take up the exam. I had all this pressure on me.

Preparations and exam
I managed to get two days off, one day for preparation and one day for the exam. I also spent the last three evenings for this purpose. I did not attend any Cisco training class and use only CCNA Prep center (Exam Study tab) for preparation. This web site is very useful and the content provided is sufficient for experienced professionals. If you start from scratch, it will be good for you to attend a Cisco CCNA class, but not a CCNA bootcamp. This is not a big deal. Don’t waste your money.

Exam day did not start very well. The weather was rainy. There was a traffic jam. I reached the exam center just five minutes before my reservation. A cute girl told me that I can start two hours later because of some technical problems. I spent that time in a café (well-known chain), near the exam center. I realized again, these cafes are not as good as people believe them to be (tables, pictures etc. fine but what about the taste). When I returned to exam center another cute girl told me that they are just downloading the exam. I had to wait 15 minutes more. Cable paths caught my attention, I easily came to know that bad materials were used and it was installed by an inexperienced staff.

Lectures / Lessons Learned
- Time is enough, do not hurry
- You need to know the basic configuration of RIPv2, OSPF, EIGRP
- Basics of routing algorithms
- Be able to configure NAT
- Be able to configure DHCP
- Understanding of ACL
- Basics of wireless network, how WPA works
- No questions like binary equivalent of something
- But be able to calculate subnets
- Match given IPs to given topology/schema
- Differentiate the terms MAC, IP and TCP/UDP ports
- How a packet travels within the network (ARP, encapsulation)
- OSI layers vs. TCP/IP layers
- Chose the exam center with pretty girls , they keep you lively!

In general, exam went better than I expected. The questions were mostly about useful subjects. It requires just two days to study for me.

How can I use these credits?
You can use these credits for any training you need. You just have to check the required amount of credits from cisco.com to get trained. For example, you need 29 CLCs (Cisco Learning Credits) for Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks training (BCMSN). You can also attend the Networkers online. For the full conference pass, you need 19 CLCs.

Why should I buy CLCs instead of training?
If you work in a small company, you do not need it. But if you are working in a big organization (government, enterprise companies) it can be a real headache for you to participate in training. You should have within the training budget and it must be approved by HR department. This is not a simple process and involves permission from many people.

Otherwise, you have to prepare a kit list which includes hardware, software, SMARTnet and CLCs. All of them will be purchased together. In this way, if the logistics department comes with a wireless project in the middle of the fiscal year or the bosses decided to buy some security products after a security audit, then they will pay for necessary training without much discussions.

For the details please check “Cisco Learning Credits”.