TSHOOT... real life?
I am not sure if I agree with many people saying, that T-shoot is real life.
Here is what I think:
- exam is too hard for people with no experience
- in real life you will not face a situation, when sth stopped working and you have no idea where to start... On this exam they can e.g. put ospf in a wrong area and NOT GIVE YOU ANY CLUE WHAT WAS DONE in the last few days. It is very very very unlikely to have anything like this in a topology with 7 routers!!!
mk,
I think that the TShoot was very close to real-life situations. You typically get a ticket or call from a user with limited info like, "I can't get to some website" and it's up to you to dig in and use some sort of structured troubleshooting process to locate the issue and figure out what needs to be solved. You don't always have another engineer to tell you exactly what changes were made, or what to configure on a device.
What I felt was the main point of the exam was how to use a troubleshooting process to narrow down where the issue could exist.
Also, in response to the difficulty, the CCNP is not intended for people with no experience like the CCNA or CCENT. Cisco recommends that a CCNP candidate should be someone that has a couple years of network experience with Cisco equipment.
I had a job working on a very large network when I was only a CCNA. Probably no one is going to hire a green CCNA to work on such a network, but a CCNA with experience working on smaller networks can get a job doing the sorts of things that are covered on the CCNP exams. Certifications are not the only measure of an engineer's skill; I have worked with very good engineers that have no certifications at all.
I do not like this attitude, that a cert is only to CONFIRM you are good at sth. It should allow you to get a better job!
People who work with 75 routers running BGP - DO NOT NEED ANY CERTS, they have more knowledge than CCIEs, as you mentioned above.
To get a job like this you have to be at least ccnp, but how to get experience to pass if you have to have ccnp in place to work in a place like this ;-)
I am not saying it is not possible to get a job like this, but please remember, that it is not easy and ccna/ccnp should HELP me DO it!
I'm working at a huge site. Sasol Secunda in South-Africa. And it's a difficult site. We are running, mpls, bgp, ospf, eigrp etc. We have 12 6500's, about 500 3750 and about 800 2960's. Even with such a big site. Even me still at CCNA hasn't been exposed to too much Troubleshoot. As the other CCNP's handle it. It frustrating
I just passed the TSHOOT exam and I have to say it was tough. For me it was much more difficult then ROUTE and SWITCH.
Since you can only do show commands, this making it hard to be sure that it was actually the issue/s causing the problem.
So, when people say that this exam is "real world" I have to agree only partially. Since in the real world we would be able to do SHOW commands to narrow down things but also we would be able to make config changes to check our findings.
I do like this format of exam, but wish it would also allow to make the changes to the configuration and actually solve/fix the issue.
As someone who works in a large network (12-14k people) with no experience I would say the test is fairly accurate to life. I have seen issues where someone would make a change that broke something without telling anyone, then leave for the day.
You can get a job at as a green person on a large network, you just have to work your way up the ladder by being good and working hard along the way (within the same company).
As for the exam being to hard I don't agree, they give you the topology ahead of time, and besides as musicjunky said it's suppose to be hard, if the Cisco tests were easy they would be like a comptia cert that I wouldn't bother even putting on my resume. Is the CCIE to hard for people with no experience? Yes it is, and it's suppose to be, hence why CCIEs are awesome. There are already 2 certs for beginners, why drag the cert down?
I found that the exam gives you the basics of network TSHOOT, it's upto the person to carry on gaining XP over the years. But is it true to life?
Yes.
People make mistakes and people fix them. The more XP you have the quicker you will likely find the fault.
This exam if you give an idea of what the CCIE will be like.... but ALOT harder.
@MK
The way to get the XP is get a job lower pay and work your way up.
I have absolutely different opinion. Nobody will hire/allow a CCNA guy to touch ospf, eigrp, l3 routing in a topology that they show at Tshoot. I do not argue, that the direction is wrong of this exam, but Cisco should remember that CCNA is just a beginning and nobody will ask you to investigate BGP issue when you are CCNA..
I passed my CCNP and I scored very well with T-shoot, but I think there are too many too general tickets over there.
It is not Cisco only, Microsoft for MCSE asks you to have experience with multiple sites, 2k of users... Who will allow you to touch a network with 12 sites and 5k of users, when you are MCSA only?