Step 6 : Practice

Although it is possible that you have some hands-on experience due to your job, the main focus should be practice, practice, practice. One time during a ccie coaching session I saw that a participant was very smart, but he was very slow with typing. I advised him to have typing lessons first. When he was capable to type fast, he started to practice again for the lab. Even though you know how to configure simple tasks, just practice those tasks on a daily bases so that you can type them in notepad without any mistake.

My best practice was to have a configuration on the router with only an ip address and save this configuration on the flash. When I was starting the day, I just copied this configuration to the router and started with an empty router again. To do this every day, I got faster on the basics so that I had time for more complex configuration. It is not easy to become a CCIE