RTA Update 7/16/13

It has been a rough past couple of months for me. I have been working very hard at work and hard to maintain my house with the normal rigmarole.

Lately I have been focused on renewing my expired CCNA Certification which lapsed back in April and I have been inundated with pressing personal and family matters of which I couldn’t stay focused long enough for me to take the 640-802 CCNA exam or one of the 3 CCNP exams.  Upon further investigation at the Cisco website I have learned that the 640-802 exam will be fully retired on 9/30/2013.

I have looked and there is many new changes with the Cisco Certification paths. A good explanation of the changes can be found on Todd Lammle’s website and blog.  It has a good diagram showing the new paths and from the looks of it looks like Cisco is Concentrating on making the lower level exams harder to obtain with more real world experience and topics.

From reading that entry and his entry on what the CCENT exam  shows that there IPv6, VPN’s and Device Security are the new topics in addition to the basic Router/Switch setup, Routing protocol configuration, and the OSI model in addition to the normal networking training.

For me, I am going to be studying for the 640-802 exam and try to take that before the deadline as I already had my CCNA. I have been using Lammle’s book published by Sybex Titled CCNA Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide, 7th Edition and the CBT Nuggets Video Training Series for CCNA.

I am going to be studying the way I have outlined in one of my Previous Posts CCNA Training Tips. I will go a head and post more updates as I get progress in the path of recertification. It should be Fun. My goal is to Pass the exam by September which should be a good goal.