Introduction#
In my goal to become a cybersecurity practitioner, I acknowledged that it is essential to have an understanding of networking, as majority of hacks and breaches happen on that layer.
Back when I was in university, Monday used to be one of our longest lecture days. Particularly for me, I was working part-time at a supermarket from 04:00 - 08:00, then taking the train to university and starting the lectures at 09:00 until 13:00, followed by a 1 hour break, then our Networking lesson from 14:00 to 18:00.
Being awake very early for my job, I was literally dozing off during the lesson – not a good look. The fact that our lecturer was literally reading off PowerPoint slides, each packed with lots of information didn’t help much, lots of students were missing from the classroom too, choosing to skip the lessons altogether. Well, not me! Even though I was super tired, I was still doing my best to try and understand. After passing the exams and module, we never had to deal with Networking again in the following years.
Trying to get into cybersecurity#
I’ve watched several roadmaps on how to get into the cybersecurity field as a beginner, and several people (YouTube) have recommended to get the Cisco CCNA certification. I am aware that it is intermediate level and quite difficult, but not impossible. There is also CompTIA Network+ and it is not as tough as CCNA, but if I’m planning on achieving the latter, might as well save myself some money in the process, plus lots of vendors use Cisco equipment.
Just when I thought that I would be done with Networking and never have to study again, I regretted not liking the lectures from university.
Studying for CCNA#
I have researched several resources on studying for the exam, one that caught my interest being Jeremy’s IT Lab CCNA Course on YouTube. It is completely free, the lecturer (Jeremy McDowell) explains things very well and organises the lectures in a way that combines both theory and practice (Packet Tracer labs and Anki flashcards).
Currently I am about halfway through the course and I’m not going to lie, it is quite challenging (looking at you Spanning Tree Protocol), however with enough revision and practice labs it becomes a bit clearer.
After finishing the course I plan to do practice exams using Boson ExSim-Max, carefully going through each question, analysing all the wrong and correct answers, finding my weakest areas and going back to the course videos where needed.
My aim is to take the official exam sometime September ~ October 2025.
