Running CCNA2

We just ran a CCNA2 (Routing Protocols and Concepts) class last week. It’s our second run, and CCNA2 is the second of four courses designed to prepare candidates to sit for the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) examination. It’s a small class, so it was quite easy to manage. But at the same time, it was quite tiring, partly because as the instructor, I had to go through all the topics myself to make sure I was familiar with the curriculum.

CCNA is mostly about practical skills. Yet, even in a real production operational environment, we don’t practice everything. Furthermore, we don’t run these courses often enough. So as a result, there are will be many details that are forgotten. Revising all the topics is time consuming. I took almost one week of nights to finish 11 chapters. It’s actually not very difficult, it’s just that there’s quite a bit of materials to cover.

The class was, as mentioned earlier, quite easy to run. The class size was small, and most people were “techie”. But the labs were still a lot of fun… seeing all the expected mistakes and frustrations happening over and over again. Things like, connect to the wrong router, connecting to the wrong port, using the wrong notebook, cables going to the wrong places, etc. It’s all pretty typical of a real physical lab (as opposed to the Packet Tracer virtual lab simulation).