Category Archives: CCIE Coaching

Happy Holidays and IT Training!

Happy Holidays to all my faithful blog followers here at AJSNetworking.com. Thank you so much for another incredible year of fun and interesting comments and discussions regarding mainly IT Training. 🙂

IT Training

My Holiday gift to many of you this year is to finally get after my Free Evolving Technologies Training as I promised. This is that new section of every CCIE Written Exam that is causing great stress for many candidates. Stress not. I will do the hard work of finding the correct documentation and detailing it for you on every topic on this list!

Something else I will be doing more than ever per reader request is many more quizzes here at the site. These will run the gamut from Cisco to Juniper to Microsoft and more and will cover all levels of professional certification.

If you are interested in my non-free IT Training stuff 🙂 here is a run down of what I am currently working on this Holiday Season:

  • The Exam 70-698 Installing and Configuring Windows 10 Course for CBT Nuggets; this course features Nugget-based Hands On Labs so you can follow along with me in a Windows 10 Pro environment as you enjoy your IT Training! There are about 46 Nuggets complete and up there at the moment. The total course will be close to 80 Nuggets and completes around 1/13/2017. All of the Nuggets are uploaded by that date, it just takes some time for the video reviewers to watch and approve them.
  • Mastering Agile Project Management is most likely my next course for CBT Nuggets; then I will be looking to hit some key Router and Switch Technologies for you like QoS and Multicast and the like. These topics appear in more professional certifications than ever before (as they should) and there seems to be a drought of great training in these areas.
  • My CCENT ICND1 100-105 Exam Cram, 3rd Edition arrives in print on December 30, 2016 just in time for the new year! You will love this text. Keith Barker was the Tech Editor and we created a work of art here when it comes to your exam success. use the link at the bottom of this blog post for a nice discount on your order!
  • My CCNA Routing and Switching 200-125 Exam Cram, 5th Edition arrives in print on March 1, 2017 (or sooner). Again, Keith Barker helped me create an incredibly laser focused and concise guide to exam success.
  • My MCSA 70-740 Cert Guide: Installation, Storage, and Compute with Windows Server 2016 (Certification Guide) arrives in print around March 2017 and features critical and hard to find documentation on this exciting new Server Operating System from Microsoft. The goal in this text is to get you up and running in production data centers with the new OS, but also to ensure the exam is a manageable and pleasant experience! This can be a challenge when it comes to Microsoft Certs to say the least!

Thanks again for visiting my site – and of course – HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

The CCENT/ICND1 Exam Cram for 100-105icon

Things I Learned Training for a Half Marathon

Training Over
Finish line a few feet ahead!

“The Best Part Was the Training”

Talk to marathon and half marathon runners and you will often here this phrase. Yes, that’s right – they LOVED training for it. The event itself, well, that might be kind of exciting and incredible as well, but it might not matter as much since you train for months and months and you LOVE doing that. And I suppose that is the first lesson isn’t it. We need to make sure we love the training process. If you are not loving the training, then figure out exactly why you are not and get ready to fix that. I hope these other tips I picked up and learned along the way will help you as well. And of course this goes for whatever goal you are trying to achieve.

Track Your Training

This is one you have probably heard me talk about before. With my classes at CBT Nuggets, I even include trackers for the students to use as they move through the course.  For me, tracking became an obsession, and this obsession proved very motivating. Also, in the specific area of distance running it was very necessary since I had to find the perfect pace at which I would have a chance to complete the actual race.

Find a Training Buddy

I would not have succeeded in this endeavor without a training buddy. Someone to push me, hold me accountable, discuss ideas with, etc. By the way, that is my training buddy pictured above! When we started, I was better at running and really enjoyed it much more than her. As you can see from that finish line shot, that all changed!

Add Fun!

When I would run with my buddy, we would chat. And you know me, I love to chat. When running by myself I would add music. I am so busy, there is often never time to check out some latest album. These solo runs, which I might have really disliked, became fun with music added.

Join a Community

OK, I never joined a runner’s community, but I lurked at a bunch of them. Getting questions answered that were crucial for my success.

Don’t Let Jerks Get You Down

If you are into social media, or in a community of people online, you are going to run into jerks and trolls, it just happens. When people are hiding behind a keyboard, they can become pretty callous and mean. To add a problem, many times someone will sound like a jerk when they are actually not trying to act like that. During my training, someone posted on Twitter in response to one of my training posts that included statistics on a run – “You know you are not running right? You are jogging!” While I thought about getting angry about this, I just blew it off.

Get Excited for the Next Goal!

While there was some amount of “thank God that is over!”, after the race I became very excited about the future and more health goals. This thing had kicked weight loss into overdrive. I lost 14 pounds over the course of training and the race. Not bad. Now I can really up fitness goals of the future…

Thanks for reading, and remember, LOVE your training!

Cisco CCIE Lab Builder