Training and Certification

howdy! 

I'm so happy with the invitation from Juniper Networks to share my professional journey, some tips to prepare for certification exams and to help people with their professional career development. I'm happy to share all strategies and materials I've used on all my 15x Juniper certifications (That you can use for any other exams). I hope you enjoy reading this post and let me know if you have any questions. I will share my contact details at the end of the post! So, let's go!

The beginning of my journey

I confess that I don't have many memories of when I had my first experience with Computer networks and telecommunications area because my oldest memories are from 1999-2000's, when I was just 10 years old and I used helped my father, Marcelo França (in memory), who had a telecommunications company in the city of Belo Horizonte (Brazil).

I remember helping him on the weekends making a network cable, pulling cables, organizing a telecommunications rack, as well as making small technical notes such as the order of the cables (green-white, green, orange-white, blue…It was my preferred activity) and doing some notes about numeric codes to configure some Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX) servers. Also, I remember taking pieces of 50-pair CTP-APL cable to make bracelets. Really good times! 😂

These are my first course completion certificates (IT and typing) that I achieved in 2001, when I was 11yo:


My first professional experience was in 2010 when I started working as an IT assistant at a company called BH Farma, a medicine distributor in Belo Horizonte city. I was responsible for managing user profiles on Samba server, formatting computers, administering Network services such as DNS, DHCP and so on. During this time, I only had practical experience that I've acquired while helping my father, however, without any theoretical basis. Then, I realized that I was missing the main thing: The fundamentals!

So, I decided to enroll in the computer networks technical course at SENAC in Belo Horizonte. While I was studying, SENAC helped me to get my first internship and  later invited me to join as a Technical Instructor.  I've worked there for 6 years.

During this period, I needed to dedicate myself to reading and studying a lot to be able to teach new students many topics of Network and Telecommunications systems. In my opinion, studying a lot of books was an important point that made me grow professionally: I studied network fundamentals every single day for 6 years before deciding to get more certifications beyond the CCNA ITQ (for instructor).

I could acquire a solid base of knowledge there, I also won some awards and recognition as a honored teacher and some articles in Encontro magazine (2015) and FeComércio magazine (2016) talking about professional certifications:

While working there, I had two big challenges in getting some certifications: fear of failing the exam and difficulty paying for them. Perhaps the fear of failing was the biggest one, so I've decided to invest in some complementary courses. I took several training courses, participated in many conferences and events, acquired several books on different subjects such as Network, Linux, Routing and Switching, Security and some others on Network Infrastructure. In 2014, I took one of the best training courses I've ever done, it's called FreeBSD Server System Administrator (S.S.A), where I was able to learn about some equipment and solutions based on Berkeley's Unix, that includes Juniper routers.

My journey with Juniper devices

After a few days of FreeBSD training, taking advantage of the fact that I was already passionate about routers (since my days as a Cisco instructor) and I've joined at an important Brazilian Service-Provider, CEMIGTelecom (AS23106) - I continued investing in my professional career. I decided to acquire some books of Juniper Networks and I bought a new laptop to do some labs on the GNS3 platform using Junos OLIVE, an image of Juniper equipment virtualized in VMWare hypervisor.

During these three years, I've worked in two different places at the same time, at CEMIGTelecom as a Network Engineer and at SENAC as a Technical Instructor. While I 'breathed' routing and switching for those long and exhausting days, I could study Network Fundamentals in depth, spending hours reading many Study-Guide books and doing a lot of Laboratories. That helped me to develop my own checklist and strategies to prepare myself before the exams.

A few years after I decided to start studying Juniper Network even though I didn't plan on taking the risk of taking an exam, I started a hiring process where certification was decisive to me. This was the first time that Juniper Certification had opened a door. A friend, who did my referral to the Hiring Manager, told me a couple of days before: "Lucas, you need to improve your resume before I can refer you internally! the process will move forward in one week, can you get at least a JNCIA? Are you prepared to achieve at least this certification in 5 days?"

Then, I said: "Leo, I believe that I can get this certification because I've been preparing myself for 3 years. But I don't have enough money to pay for that". He said, "Ok, I'll pay for this exam for you as a gift, no worries, go ahead booking the exam". It was a mix of emotions - I was excited and afraid at the same time. Then, after a couple of hours, I decided to consult my Checklist one more time and, following its steps to organize my exam. At this time, I was sure - I'll pass the exam!  ❤️

Five days later, I was full of courage to take the exam when I finally put my insecurities aside and decided to start my journey with certifications! 🥳

By the way, I will share my way of preparing for a certification exam, so that you can apply for any certification. There are some steps that will help you to make a study's methodology and organize your materials. There is a very cool Brazilian expression for that, it's called "Pulo do Gato" - something similar to "some tips and shortcuts which you won't find on any regular books". 😀

My exam's checklist

To prepare for any certification exam I use this checklist below. I'll discuss it in depth later but in short there are just 9 items that can help you to organize your resources you will use during your studies.

            1) Choose your exam (or track) and book it.
                2) Consult the exam "Blueprint".
                3) Organize a study schedule.
                4) Organize your books and theoretical study material.
                5) LAB preparation (physical or virtual).
                6) Create a mind map of key topics.
                7) Create 'questions and answers' for final review as exercises.
                8) Extra material for review (webcast/podcast/Blog/YouTube).
               

1 - Choose your exam (or Track) and book it!

The first thing that you need to do to be motivated is choose an exam and booking it. I mean, you need to choose your exam as a target and book it even if you are not totally prepared to pass. In other words, don't wait until you are fully comfortable or totally confident because that day won't come! So, my tip is: use your credit card to pay for the exam and then, now you'll have a nice reason to be motivated! 😀

There is no "right" certification or track to start your career! Some people are more comfortable with a service-provider environment while others with security or Data-center. This step is personal and individual, as you need to choose a trail that suits you best. This step works to make you aware of all future exams that you probably will need to do to become an expert.

Every vendor has a certification track showing the path you should take. For example, if you would like to start you Juniper certification career, you can choose one of the following tracks

for more info about Tracks on Juniper Certification checkout: www.juniper.net/certification

My second tip on this step is organize your exams on a spreadsheet like Excel. For example, I organize all my exams on my Google spreadsheet, putting all necessary and important information there such as Vendor, Certification code, Level, costs, if I got a voucher for that, the status of payment (paid/saving/waiting), Results or score (pass/fail/scheduled), the exam day, the date to expire, if the exam will be on a Test-Center or online, the exact time to start the exam, some comments, links for the materials (Drive/URL/directory/Kindle) and any other information that you consider is important. Take a look on the following example of my spreadsheet:

Through this document I can keep track of the status of all certifications that I'm planning to get, besides to help me to define my personal goals. This may seem like a subtle thing, but it makes a big difference. 

2 - Consult the exam Blueprint

This is one of the most important steps because based on that, you can define if you'll need an additional resource (such as a specific book or additional training) or not.  In other words, if you already have strong experience with data-center using vendor X you probably won't need to learn all fundamentals concepts once again. So, you can keep your focus only on "New topics" of the exam.

In summary, the Blueprint document will give you a list of all content required on the exam and then, you can create a table with 3 columns: To revise (concepts or protocol behavior that works the same way for all vendors), To improve (how to configure a protocol is different from every single vendor in terms of CLI), New to learn (a protocol or service that is unique on that vendor).

<w:sdt contentlocked="t" sdttag="goog_rdk_0" id="-925339278"></w:sdt>

For example, for more info about blueprints on Juniper Certification checkout: www.juniper.net/certification

3 - Organize a study schedule

I consider the studies like an investment - a time and effort investment which requires dedication and professionalism. We are talking about your career, right? So, try to save at least two hours a day to stay studying. I know that it's so difficult at the beginning, however the daily consistency will make things easier. Start saving just 30 minutes per day and keep progressing a little every day. 🙂

After defining your reserved time to keep your focus studying, then, you also can organize it using a table with which content you'll study during the month. Of course, at the beginning of your career, you'll probably study just one content during a month and focus all your attention on only one exam. There is no issue with this approach.

According to my progress, analyzing the blueprints documents, I could see that two different exams (or more) share a "CORE" of content and I haven't needed to study twice for the same content. For example, for JNCIA and CCNA, many topics have the same requirements such as Network fundamentals, protocol behaviors, IPv4 and IPv6 concepts and so on. Then, after a long time I've started studying for different exams at the same time while trying to reuse both concepts in different exams. You don't need to relearn the same protocol three or four times! It saves time and time is an investment!

In this step, the main goal is to organize the content using a color scheme based on which content is more important and which you can spend more time on. Just an example:

For my example, I've organized the content based on "which is my priority content that I need to keep focus". I've organized using exam names, but you can use content like "BGP", "OSPF", "MPLS" etc.

4 - Organize your books and theoretical study material

Talking about study material, my tip is: Don't get too many books or PDFs, instead, stay with one or two books, one or two PDFs. Perform a qualitative rather than quantitative analysis on your documents. I feel lost when I have 20 or 30 sources of information to read, so I always prefer "the Official Study-Guide" for any certification exam. 

Additionally, I use four ways to organize my study material:

  a) Use an official academy - (For example Juniper Learning Portal https://learningportal.juniper.net/ )
  b) Books on my Kindle (PDFs).
  c) Paperback books - I generally prefer paper books because I like taking notes in them. 🙂
  d) URLs (some interesting Blogs or YouTube videos) - organized in Google Chrome favorites bar.

One tip more: as this stage requires an investment of money $$, I usually save part of my salary by saving it and reserving it exclusively for the educational part. Every month I save about 50 to 100 dollars (I've started saving about 10 bucks) - which will be used exclusively as my educational resource. Therefore, I use it to buy a new book, pay for specific training, or even pay for another exam. Financial organization at this stage is very important.

You can also start searching for an official and no cost resource. For example, In addition to the Papers book, I always use the Juniper Day-One books website - which is one of my favorite sources of content.

There are +75 books available for download, all for free, with content rich in details, with an operational approach, with several examples of CLI commands and use case studies. Essential for anyone studying for Juniper certifications.

For more info about DayOne Books on Juniper Certification checkout:
https://www.juniper.net/documentation/jnbooks/us/en/day-one-books


Before moving to another topic, I couldn't forget to talk about the best certification program I have ever seen, the Juniper Open Learning:

I'm not talking about the content itself (which is excellent), but I need to mention the discounted exam voucher program available on every single course. On their own Juniper words: "Complete all the course modules and pass the Voucher Assessment Test with a score of 70% or higher and you will receive a 75% discount on your live exam, making it just $50 - a small investment to enhance your career."

Just giving you an example, I got six (6!) Juniper certifications spending only $350 USD - Yeah!
It's cheaper than only one "traditional Associate Level exam" of other vendors.

Using the Voucher program, I've spent:
                JNCIA-JUNOS      → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-SECURITY → $200              → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-DESIGN    → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-MIST        → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied

JNCIS-SP               → $300               → $75 after the voucher applied
                JNCIS-ENT            → $300               → $75 after the voucher applied

So, at the end of the day, I spent only $350 instead of $1400 to schedule six exams - I could save more than $1.000 dollars! 😍

For more info about Juniper Open Learning checkout: www.juniper.net/openlearning

5 - LAB preparation (physical or virtual)

Putting everything you have learned into practice is a very important step. The practical LAB helps you to enforce your understanding about the behavior of one protocol or solution, mainly to develop your CLI skills. In my opinion, this step is the complement of the fundamentals, once you've learned how the protocol works, so, now you need to know how to configure it on your preferred vendor. Thoses LABs will help you to improve your time spent during troubleshooting, I mean, you'll feel more comfortable as you continue practicing.

Actually, it looks like a video-game, it's better than my Playstation - I love opening a putty terminal, connecting into a router and starting playing some LABs.  😀

On that stage, I use three ways to prepare my practical LAB:

a) Create a LAB with real equipments - (as shown on my juniper home-lab below)

This option enables you to test some features which are not available (or with limitation) on a virtual machine. The advantage is that you can set up a lab using a legacy computer, beyond having a real behavior of everything on a packet flow. The drawback is you should have an environment with enough electrical power, space and so on.

b) Configure a Virtual LAB (using EVE-NG or GNS3)

The big advantage of virtual solutions is the capability of creating large environments with "big" routers and switches such as Juniper vMX, vQFX, vSRV and vJunos EX9200, in a few clicks. Furthermore, some 'small devices' don't have all the features like 'large device' (EX switches compared with QFX switches), so, It's easier to create a virtual lab with 10 QFX switches than buy all of them! 

My favorite solution for virtual Labs is the EVE-NG software.

In addition, in Brazil you can find some company offering LaaS (Lab as a Service) where you pay a monthly fee to gather access into a Cloud platform and there, you can create your own lab using a shared EVE-NG server.

c) Use the official Juniper vLABs

You don't need additional investment to buy new devices or deploy an EVE-NG server to practice in a LAB. Juniper Networks offers a platform with  'pre-built' topologies (like a sandbox) where you can explore some products and solutions - all for free - It's called Juniper vLabs.

There are pre-built labs for Routing, Switching, Security, Data-Center, Automation, Network Management or Standalone labs. The main advantage of this platform is that it is free and you don't need to prepare anything before, I mean, you just need to click on [Launch Lab] and start playing. The disadvantage is that all labs are fixed, I mean, you can't create your own lab or use your own topology.

In my opinion, that solution is fantastic to start putting your hands on! You don't have an excuse anymore, just do it! 😂

For more info about Juniper vLABs checkout:
https://jlabs.juniper.net/vlabs/portal/index.page

6 - Create a mind map of key topics

I strongly recommend creating a "mind map" to organize your ideas. This is another item that seems irrelevant, but it makes a big difference on the day before the exam.

The mind map is a kind of diagram for representing ideas or concepts which helps you visually develop and organize your information. You can interconnect every small note (idea) in another one, like a brain, linking all ideas to an arranged central concept.

There is no "right way" to create this mind map - some people create it using sticky or post-it notes. I've used Microsoft Visio to create mine, where I could put a lot of tips, key topics, useful commands, some specific information that I need to remember during the exam, some process that I need to follow in the right order, a tutorial, steps to configure something, etc.

The image above is a little part of one of my mind-maps used to study for exams.

7) Create 'questions and answers' for final review as exercises 
While reading my official study guide, I make some notes on it, then, I use these notes to create questions and answers as an exercise a couple of days before the exam. I also take advantage of the questions at the end of each book's chapter. Another resource is using the exercise available on each section on the training of Juniper Open Learning.

I like to make a compilation of questions to review close to the exam date, like a practice list that I needed to do when I was in college.

8) Additional material for review

Juniper offers some free certification prep sessions in your local language. Those 90 minute webcasts can help you to review all topics covered at the exam. For example, I've conducted five (5) Official Juniper webcasts in Portuguese, talking about JNCIA and JNCIS-SP exams. .

Some Final Thoughts

Hey guys,

First of all, I would like to thank Juniper's Education Services team for inviting me to share a little of my professional career. I know that these tips are not a cake recipe, I mean, some things may make sense to someone but others don't... and that's okay!

I hope that everyone can succeed and pass on your next certification exam and be able to share a photo like mine below, one of the happiest moments I've ever had in my professional life:

My last 2 cents: be consistent, resilient, no excuses and do not give up! Never ever!

If you have any questions or suggestions, I would like to share my contact details here:

Feel free to get in touch.

See you!

Lucas França
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasfrancabsd/

Btw, to generate that cool pic of badges, you can use the following URL: https://ksa.juniper.net/mycertifications/web/index.html

Thank you Lucas for sharing your journey. This is great and definitely helpful for the candidates preparing for different Juniper certifications. 

howdy! 

I'm so happy with the invitation from Juniper Networks to share my professional journey, some tips to prepare for certification exams and to help people with their professional career development. I'm happy to share all strategies and materials I've used on all my 15x Juniper certifications (That you can use for any other exams). I hope you enjoy reading this post and let me know if you have any questions. I will share my contact details at the end of the post! So, let's go!

The beginning of my journey

I confess that I don't have many memories of when I had my first experience with Computer networks and telecommunications area because my oldest memories are from 1999-2000's, when I was just 10 years old and I used helped my father, Marcelo França (in memory), who had a telecommunications company in the city of Belo Horizonte (Brazil).

I remember helping him on the weekends making a network cable, pulling cables, organizing a telecommunications rack, as well as making small technical notes such as the order of the cables (green-white, green, orange-white, blue…It was my preferred activity) and doing some notes about numeric codes to configure some Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX) servers. Also, I remember taking pieces of 50-pair CTP-APL cable to make bracelets. Really good times! 😂

These are my first course completion certificates (IT and typing) that I achieved in 2001, when I was 11yo:


My first professional experience was in 2010 when I started working as an IT assistant at a company called BH Farma, a medicine distributor in Belo Horizonte city. I was responsible for managing user profiles on Samba server, formatting computers, administering Network services such as DNS, DHCP and so on. During this time, I only had practical experience that I've acquired while helping my father, however, without any theoretical basis. Then, I realized that I was missing the main thing: The fundamentals!

So, I decided to enroll in the computer networks technical course at SENAC in Belo Horizonte. While I was studying, SENAC helped me to get my first internship and  later invited me to join as a Technical Instructor.  I've worked there for 6 years.

During this period, I needed to dedicate myself to reading and studying a lot to be able to teach new students many topics of Network and Telecommunications systems. In my opinion, studying a lot of books was an important point that made me grow professionally: I studied network fundamentals every single day for 6 years before deciding to get more certifications beyond the CCNA ITQ (for instructor).

I could acquire a solid base of knowledge there, I also won some awards and recognition as a honored teacher and some articles in Encontro magazine (2015) and FeComércio magazine (2016) talking about professional certifications:

While working there, I had two big challenges in getting some certifications: fear of failing the exam and difficulty paying for them. Perhaps the fear of failing was the biggest one, so I've decided to invest in some complementary courses. I took several training courses, participated in many conferences and events, acquired several books on different subjects such as Network, Linux, Routing and Switching, Security and some others on Network Infrastructure. In 2014, I took one of the best training courses I've ever done, it's called FreeBSD Server System Administrator (S.S.A), where I was able to learn about some equipment and solutions based on Berkeley's Unix, that includes Juniper routers.

My journey with Juniper devices

After a few days of FreeBSD training, taking advantage of the fact that I was already passionate about routers (since my days as a Cisco instructor) and I've joined at an important Brazilian Service-Provider, CEMIGTelecom (AS23106) - I continued investing in my professional career. I decided to acquire some books of Juniper Networks and I bought a new laptop to do some labs on the GNS3 platform using Junos OLIVE, an image of Juniper equipment virtualized in VMWare hypervisor.

During these three years, I've worked in two different places at the same time, at CEMIGTelecom as a Network Engineer and at SENAC as a Technical Instructor. While I 'breathed' routing and switching for those long and exhausting days, I could study Network Fundamentals in depth, spending hours reading many Study-Guide books and doing a lot of Laboratories. That helped me to develop my own checklist and strategies to prepare myself before the exams.

A few years after I decided to start studying Juniper Network even though I didn't plan on taking the risk of taking an exam, I started a hiring process where certification was decisive to me. This was the first time that Juniper Certification had opened a door. A friend, who did my referral to the Hiring Manager, told me a couple of days before: "Lucas, you need to improve your resume before I can refer you internally! the process will move forward in one week, can you get at least a JNCIA? Are you prepared to achieve at least this certification in 5 days?"

Then, I said: "Leo, I believe that I can get this certification because I've been preparing myself for 3 years. But I don't have enough money to pay for that". He said, "Ok, I'll pay for this exam for you as a gift, no worries, go ahead booking the exam". It was a mix of emotions - I was excited and afraid at the same time. Then, after a couple of hours, I decided to consult my Checklist one more time and, following its steps to organize my exam. At this time, I was sure - I'll pass the exam!  ❤️

Five days later, I was full of courage to take the exam when I finally put my insecurities aside and decided to start my journey with certifications! 🥳

By the way, I will share my way of preparing for a certification exam, so that you can apply for any certification. There are some steps that will help you to make a study's methodology and organize your materials. There is a very cool Brazilian expression for that, it's called "Pulo do Gato" - something similar to "some tips and shortcuts which you won't find on any regular books". 😀

My exam's checklist

To prepare for any certification exam I use this checklist below. I'll discuss it in depth later but in short there are just 9 items that can help you to organize your resources you will use during your studies.

            1) Choose your exam (or track) and book it.
                2) Consult the exam "Blueprint".
                3) Organize a study schedule.
                4) Organize your books and theoretical study material.
                5) LAB preparation (physical or virtual).
                6) Create a mind map of key topics.
                7) Create 'questions and answers' for final review as exercises.
                8) Extra material for review (webcast/podcast/Blog/YouTube).
               

1 - Choose your exam (or Track) and book it!

The first thing that you need to do to be motivated is choose an exam and booking it. I mean, you need to choose your exam as a target and book it even if you are not totally prepared to pass. In other words, don't wait until you are fully comfortable or totally confident because that day won't come! So, my tip is: use your credit card to pay for the exam and then, now you'll have a nice reason to be motivated! 😀

There is no "right" certification or track to start your career! Some people are more comfortable with a service-provider environment while others with security or Data-center. This step is personal and individual, as you need to choose a trail that suits you best. This step works to make you aware of all future exams that you probably will need to do to become an expert.

Every vendor has a certification track showing the path you should take. For example, if you would like to start you Juniper certification career, you can choose one of the following tracks

for more info about Tracks on Juniper Certification checkout: www.juniper.net/certification

My second tip on this step is organize your exams on a spreadsheet like Excel. For example, I organize all my exams on my Google spreadsheet, putting all necessary and important information there such as Vendor, Certification code, Level, costs, if I got a voucher for that, the status of payment (paid/saving/waiting), Results or score (pass/fail/scheduled), the exam day, the date to expire, if the exam will be on a Test-Center or online, the exact time to start the exam, some comments, links for the materials (Drive/URL/directory/Kindle) and any other information that you consider is important. Take a look on the following example of my spreadsheet:

Through this document I can keep track of the status of all certifications that I'm planning to get, besides to help me to define my personal goals. This may seem like a subtle thing, but it makes a big difference. 

2 - Consult the exam Blueprint

This is one of the most important steps because based on that, you can define if you'll need an additional resource (such as a specific book or additional training) or not.  In other words, if you already have strong experience with data-center using vendor X you probably won't need to learn all fundamentals concepts once again. So, you can keep your focus only on "New topics" of the exam.

In summary, the Blueprint document will give you a list of all content required on the exam and then, you can create a table with 3 columns: To revise (concepts or protocol behavior that works the same way for all vendors), To improve (how to configure a protocol is different from every single vendor in terms of CLI), New to learn (a protocol or service that is unique on that vendor).

<w:sdt contentlocked="t" sdttag="goog_rdk_0" id="-925339278"></w:sdt>

For example, for more info about blueprints on Juniper Certification checkout: www.juniper.net/certification

3 - Organize a study schedule

I consider the studies like an investment - a time and effort investment which requires dedication and professionalism. We are talking about your career, right? So, try to save at least two hours a day to stay studying. I know that it's so difficult at the beginning, however the daily consistency will make things easier. Start saving just 30 minutes per day and keep progressing a little every day. 🙂

After defining your reserved time to keep your focus studying, then, you also can organize it using a table with which content you'll study during the month. Of course, at the beginning of your career, you'll probably study just one content during a month and focus all your attention on only one exam. There is no issue with this approach.

According to my progress, analyzing the blueprints documents, I could see that two different exams (or more) share a "CORE" of content and I haven't needed to study twice for the same content. For example, for JNCIA and CCNA, many topics have the same requirements such as Network fundamentals, protocol behaviors, IPv4 and IPv6 concepts and so on. Then, after a long time I've started studying for different exams at the same time while trying to reuse both concepts in different exams. You don't need to relearn the same protocol three or four times! It saves time and time is an investment!

In this step, the main goal is to organize the content using a color scheme based on which content is more important and which you can spend more time on. Just an example:

For my example, I've organized the content based on "which is my priority content that I need to keep focus". I've organized using exam names, but you can use content like "BGP", "OSPF", "MPLS" etc.

4 - Organize your books and theoretical study material

Talking about study material, my tip is: Don't get too many books or PDFs, instead, stay with one or two books, one or two PDFs. Perform a qualitative rather than quantitative analysis on your documents. I feel lost when I have 20 or 30 sources of information to read, so I always prefer "the Official Study-Guide" for any certification exam. 

Additionally, I use four ways to organize my study material:

  a) Use an official academy - (For example Juniper Learning Portal https://learningportal.juniper.net/ )
  b) Books on my Kindle (PDFs).
  c) Paperback books - I generally prefer paper books because I like taking notes in them. 🙂
  d) URLs (some interesting Blogs or YouTube videos) - organized in Google Chrome favorites bar.

One tip more: as this stage requires an investment of money $$, I usually save part of my salary by saving it and reserving it exclusively for the educational part. Every month I save about 50 to 100 dollars (I've started saving about 10 bucks) - which will be used exclusively as my educational resource. Therefore, I use it to buy a new book, pay for specific training, or even pay for another exam. Financial organization at this stage is very important.

You can also start searching for an official and no cost resource. For example, In addition to the Papers book, I always use the Juniper Day-One books website - which is one of my favorite sources of content.

There are +75 books available for download, all for free, with content rich in details, with an operational approach, with several examples of CLI commands and use case studies. Essential for anyone studying for Juniper certifications.

For more info about DayOne Books on Juniper Certification checkout:
https://www.juniper.net/documentation/jnbooks/us/en/day-one-books


Before moving to another topic, I couldn't forget to talk about the best certification program I have ever seen, the Juniper Open Learning:

I'm not talking about the content itself (which is excellent), but I need to mention the discounted exam voucher program available on every single course. On their own Juniper words: "Complete all the course modules and pass the Voucher Assessment Test with a score of 70% or higher and you will receive a 75% discount on your live exam, making it just $50 - a small investment to enhance your career."

Just giving you an example, I got six (6!) Juniper certifications spending only $350 USD - Yeah!
It's cheaper than only one "traditional Associate Level exam" of other vendors.

Using the Voucher program, I've spent:
                JNCIA-JUNOS      → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-SECURITY → $200              → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-DESIGN    → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-MIST        → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied

JNCIS-SP               → $300               → $75 after the voucher applied
                JNCIS-ENT            → $300               → $75 after the voucher applied

So, at the end of the day, I spent only $350 instead of $1400 to schedule six exams - I could save more than $1.000 dollars! 😍

For more info about Juniper Open Learning checkout: www.juniper.net/openlearning

5 - LAB preparation (physical or virtual)

Putting everything you have learned into practice is a very important step. The practical LAB helps you to enforce your understanding about the behavior of one protocol or solution, mainly to develop your CLI skills. In my opinion, this step is the complement of the fundamentals, once you've learned how the protocol works, so, now you need to know how to configure it on your preferred vendor. Thoses LABs will help you to improve your time spent during troubleshooting, I mean, you'll feel more comfortable as you continue practicing.

Actually, it looks like a video-game, it's better than my Playstation - I love opening a putty terminal, connecting into a router and starting playing some LABs.  😀

On that stage, I use three ways to prepare my practical LAB:

a) Create a LAB with real equipments - (as shown on my juniper home-lab below)

This option enables you to test some features which are not available (or with limitation) on a virtual machine. The advantage is that you can set up a lab using a legacy computer, beyond having a real behavior of everything on a packet flow. The drawback is you should have an environment with enough electrical power, space and so on.

b) Configure a Virtual LAB (using EVE-NG or GNS3)

The big advantage of virtual solutions is the capability of creating large environments with "big" routers and switches such as Juniper vMX, vQFX, vSRV and vJunos EX9200, in a few clicks. Furthermore, some 'small devices' don't have all the features like 'large device' (EX switches compared with QFX switches), so, It's easier to create a virtual lab with 10 QFX switches than buy all of them! 

My favorite solution for virtual Labs is the EVE-NG software.

In addition, in Brazil you can find some company offering LaaS (Lab as a Service) where you pay a monthly fee to gather access into a Cloud platform and there, you can create your own lab using a shared EVE-NG server.

c) Use the official Juniper vLABs

You don't need additional investment to buy new devices or deploy an EVE-NG server to practice in a LAB. Juniper Networks offers a platform with  'pre-built' topologies (like a sandbox) where you can explore some products and solutions - all for free - It's called Juniper vLabs.

There are pre-built labs for Routing, Switching, Security, Data-Center, Automation, Network Management or Standalone labs. The main advantage of this platform is that it is free and you don't need to prepare anything before, I mean, you just need to click on [Launch Lab] and start playing. The disadvantage is that all labs are fixed, I mean, you can't create your own lab or use your own topology.

In my opinion, that solution is fantastic to start putting your hands on! You don't have an excuse anymore, just do it! 😂

For more info about Juniper vLABs checkout:
https://jlabs.juniper.net/vlabs/portal/index.page

6 - Create a mind map of key topics

I strongly recommend creating a "mind map" to organize your ideas. This is another item that seems irrelevant, but it makes a big difference on the day before the exam.

The mind map is a kind of diagram for representing ideas or concepts which helps you visually develop and organize your information. You can interconnect every small note (idea) in another one, like a brain, linking all ideas to an arranged central concept.

There is no "right way" to create this mind map - some people create it using sticky or post-it notes. I've used Microsoft Visio to create mine, where I could put a lot of tips, key topics, useful commands, some specific information that I need to remember during the exam, some process that I need to follow in the right order, a tutorial, steps to configure something, etc.

The image above is a little part of one of my mind-maps used to study for exams.

7) Create 'questions and answers' for final review as exercises 
While reading my official study guide, I make some notes on it, then, I use these notes to create questions and answers as an exercise a couple of days before the exam. I also take advantage of the questions at the end of each book's chapter. Another resource is using the exercise available on each section on the training of Juniper Open Learning.

I like to make a compilation of questions to review close to the exam date, like a practice list that I needed to do when I was in college.

8) Additional material for review

Juniper offers some free certification prep sessions in your local language. Those 90 minute webcasts can help you to review all topics covered at the exam. For example, I've conducted five (5) Official Juniper webcasts in Portuguese, talking about JNCIA and JNCIS-SP exams. .

Some Final Thoughts

Hey guys,

First of all, I would like to thank Juniper's Education Services team for inviting me to share a little of my professional career. I know that these tips are not a cake recipe, I mean, some things may make sense to someone but others don't... and that's okay!

I hope that everyone can succeed and pass on your next certification exam and be able to share a photo like mine below, one of the happiest moments I've ever had in my professional life:

My last 2 cents: be consistent, resilient, no excuses and do not give up! Never ever!

If you have any questions or suggestions, I would like to share my contact details here:

Feel free to get in touch.

See you!

Lucas França
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasfrancabsd/

Btw, to generate that cool pic of badges, you can use the following URL: https://ksa.juniper.net/mycertifications/web/index.html

Great post Lucas.  You have a lot of certs so your system works.  Thanks for sharing all of this detail.  This helps me with my prep for the JNCIE DC.  I am in the study and virtual lab phase.  I will incorporate your advice in my study plan.

Thank you Lucas for sharing your journey. This is great and definitely helpful for the candidates preparing for different Juniper certifications. 

howdy! 

I'm so happy with the invitation from Juniper Networks to share my professional journey, some tips to prepare for certification exams and to help people with their professional career development. I'm happy to share all strategies and materials I've used on all my 15x Juniper certifications (That you can use for any other exams). I hope you enjoy reading this post and let me know if you have any questions. I will share my contact details at the end of the post! So, let's go!

The beginning of my journey

I confess that I don't have many memories of when I had my first experience with Computer networks and telecommunications area because my oldest memories are from 1999-2000's, when I was just 10 years old and I used helped my father, Marcelo França (in memory), who had a telecommunications company in the city of Belo Horizonte (Brazil).

I remember helping him on the weekends making a network cable, pulling cables, organizing a telecommunications rack, as well as making small technical notes such as the order of the cables (green-white, green, orange-white, blue…It was my preferred activity) and doing some notes about numeric codes to configure some Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX) servers. Also, I remember taking pieces of 50-pair CTP-APL cable to make bracelets. Really good times! 😂

These are my first course completion certificates (IT and typing) that I achieved in 2001, when I was 11yo:


My first professional experience was in 2010 when I started working as an IT assistant at a company called BH Farma, a medicine distributor in Belo Horizonte city. I was responsible for managing user profiles on Samba server, formatting computers, administering Network services such as DNS, DHCP and so on. During this time, I only had practical experience that I've acquired while helping my father, however, without any theoretical basis. Then, I realized that I was missing the main thing: The fundamentals!

So, I decided to enroll in the computer networks technical course at SENAC in Belo Horizonte. While I was studying, SENAC helped me to get my first internship and  later invited me to join as a Technical Instructor.  I've worked there for 6 years.

During this period, I needed to dedicate myself to reading and studying a lot to be able to teach new students many topics of Network and Telecommunications systems. In my opinion, studying a lot of books was an important point that made me grow professionally: I studied network fundamentals every single day for 6 years before deciding to get more certifications beyond the CCNA ITQ (for instructor).

I could acquire a solid base of knowledge there, I also won some awards and recognition as a honored teacher and some articles in Encontro magazine (2015) and FeComércio magazine (2016) talking about professional certifications:

While working there, I had two big challenges in getting some certifications: fear of failing the exam and difficulty paying for them. Perhaps the fear of failing was the biggest one, so I've decided to invest in some complementary courses. I took several training courses, participated in many conferences and events, acquired several books on different subjects such as Network, Linux, Routing and Switching, Security and some others on Network Infrastructure. In 2014, I took one of the best training courses I've ever done, it's called FreeBSD Server System Administrator (S.S.A), where I was able to learn about some equipment and solutions based on Berkeley's Unix, that includes Juniper routers.

My journey with Juniper devices

After a few days of FreeBSD training, taking advantage of the fact that I was already passionate about routers (since my days as a Cisco instructor) and I've joined at an important Brazilian Service-Provider, CEMIGTelecom (AS23106) - I continued investing in my professional career. I decided to acquire some books of Juniper Networks and I bought a new laptop to do some labs on the GNS3 platform using Junos OLIVE, an image of Juniper equipment virtualized in VMWare hypervisor.

During these three years, I've worked in two different places at the same time, at CEMIGTelecom as a Network Engineer and at SENAC as a Technical Instructor. While I 'breathed' routing and switching for those long and exhausting days, I could study Network Fundamentals in depth, spending hours reading many Study-Guide books and doing a lot of Laboratories. That helped me to develop my own checklist and strategies to prepare myself before the exams.

A few years after I decided to start studying Juniper Network even though I didn't plan on taking the risk of taking an exam, I started a hiring process where certification was decisive to me. This was the first time that Juniper Certification had opened a door. A friend, who did my referral to the Hiring Manager, told me a couple of days before: "Lucas, you need to improve your resume before I can refer you internally! the process will move forward in one week, can you get at least a JNCIA? Are you prepared to achieve at least this certification in 5 days?"

Then, I said: "Leo, I believe that I can get this certification because I've been preparing myself for 3 years. But I don't have enough money to pay for that". He said, "Ok, I'll pay for this exam for you as a gift, no worries, go ahead booking the exam". It was a mix of emotions - I was excited and afraid at the same time. Then, after a couple of hours, I decided to consult my Checklist one more time and, following its steps to organize my exam. At this time, I was sure - I'll pass the exam!  ❤️

Five days later, I was full of courage to take the exam when I finally put my insecurities aside and decided to start my journey with certifications! 🥳

By the way, I will share my way of preparing for a certification exam, so that you can apply for any certification. There are some steps that will help you to make a study's methodology and organize your materials. There is a very cool Brazilian expression for that, it's called "Pulo do Gato" - something similar to "some tips and shortcuts which you won't find on any regular books". 😀

My exam's checklist

To prepare for any certification exam I use this checklist below. I'll discuss it in depth later but in short there are just 9 items that can help you to organize your resources you will use during your studies.

            1) Choose your exam (or track) and book it.
                2) Consult the exam "Blueprint".
                3) Organize a study schedule.
                4) Organize your books and theoretical study material.
                5) LAB preparation (physical or virtual).
                6) Create a mind map of key topics.
                7) Create 'questions and answers' for final review as exercises.
                8) Extra material for review (webcast/podcast/Blog/YouTube).
               

1 - Choose your exam (or Track) and book it!

The first thing that you need to do to be motivated is choose an exam and booking it. I mean, you need to choose your exam as a target and book it even if you are not totally prepared to pass. In other words, don't wait until you are fully comfortable or totally confident because that day won't come! So, my tip is: use your credit card to pay for the exam and then, now you'll have a nice reason to be motivated! 😀

There is no "right" certification or track to start your career! Some people are more comfortable with a service-provider environment while others with security or Data-center. This step is personal and individual, as you need to choose a trail that suits you best. This step works to make you aware of all future exams that you probably will need to do to become an expert.

Every vendor has a certification track showing the path you should take. For example, if you would like to start you Juniper certification career, you can choose one of the following tracks

for more info about Tracks on Juniper Certification checkout: www.juniper.net/certification

My second tip on this step is organize your exams on a spreadsheet like Excel. For example, I organize all my exams on my Google spreadsheet, putting all necessary and important information there such as Vendor, Certification code, Level, costs, if I got a voucher for that, the status of payment (paid/saving/waiting), Results or score (pass/fail/scheduled), the exam day, the date to expire, if the exam will be on a Test-Center or online, the exact time to start the exam, some comments, links for the materials (Drive/URL/directory/Kindle) and any other information that you consider is important. Take a look on the following example of my spreadsheet:

Through this document I can keep track of the status of all certifications that I'm planning to get, besides to help me to define my personal goals. This may seem like a subtle thing, but it makes a big difference. 

2 - Consult the exam Blueprint

This is one of the most important steps because based on that, you can define if you'll need an additional resource (such as a specific book or additional training) or not.  In other words, if you already have strong experience with data-center using vendor X you probably won't need to learn all fundamentals concepts once again. So, you can keep your focus only on "New topics" of the exam.

In summary, the Blueprint document will give you a list of all content required on the exam and then, you can create a table with 3 columns: To revise (concepts or protocol behavior that works the same way for all vendors), To improve (how to configure a protocol is different from every single vendor in terms of CLI), New to learn (a protocol or service that is unique on that vendor).

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For example, for more info about blueprints on Juniper Certification checkout: www.juniper.net/certification

3 - Organize a study schedule

I consider the studies like an investment - a time and effort investment which requires dedication and professionalism. We are talking about your career, right? So, try to save at least two hours a day to stay studying. I know that it's so difficult at the beginning, however the daily consistency will make things easier. Start saving just 30 minutes per day and keep progressing a little every day. 🙂

After defining your reserved time to keep your focus studying, then, you also can organize it using a table with which content you'll study during the month. Of course, at the beginning of your career, you'll probably study just one content during a month and focus all your attention on only one exam. There is no issue with this approach.

According to my progress, analyzing the blueprints documents, I could see that two different exams (or more) share a "CORE" of content and I haven't needed to study twice for the same content. For example, for JNCIA and CCNA, many topics have the same requirements such as Network fundamentals, protocol behaviors, IPv4 and IPv6 concepts and so on. Then, after a long time I've started studying for different exams at the same time while trying to reuse both concepts in different exams. You don't need to relearn the same protocol three or four times! It saves time and time is an investment!

In this step, the main goal is to organize the content using a color scheme based on which content is more important and which you can spend more time on. Just an example:

For my example, I've organized the content based on "which is my priority content that I need to keep focus". I've organized using exam names, but you can use content like "BGP", "OSPF", "MPLS" etc.

4 - Organize your books and theoretical study material

Talking about study material, my tip is: Don't get too many books or PDFs, instead, stay with one or two books, one or two PDFs. Perform a qualitative rather than quantitative analysis on your documents. I feel lost when I have 20 or 30 sources of information to read, so I always prefer "the Official Study-Guide" for any certification exam. 

Additionally, I use four ways to organize my study material:

  a) Use an official academy - (For example Juniper Learning Portal https://learningportal.juniper.net/ )
  b) Books on my Kindle (PDFs).
  c) Paperback books - I generally prefer paper books because I like taking notes in them. 🙂
  d) URLs (some interesting Blogs or YouTube videos) - organized in Google Chrome favorites bar.

One tip more: as this stage requires an investment of money $$, I usually save part of my salary by saving it and reserving it exclusively for the educational part. Every month I save about 50 to 100 dollars (I've started saving about 10 bucks) - which will be used exclusively as my educational resource. Therefore, I use it to buy a new book, pay for specific training, or even pay for another exam. Financial organization at this stage is very important.

You can also start searching for an official and no cost resource. For example, In addition to the Papers book, I always use the Juniper Day-One books website - which is one of my favorite sources of content.

There are +75 books available for download, all for free, with content rich in details, with an operational approach, with several examples of CLI commands and use case studies. Essential for anyone studying for Juniper certifications.

For more info about DayOne Books on Juniper Certification checkout:
https://www.juniper.net/documentation/jnbooks/us/en/day-one-books


Before moving to another topic, I couldn't forget to talk about the best certification program I have ever seen, the Juniper Open Learning:

I'm not talking about the content itself (which is excellent), but I need to mention the discounted exam voucher program available on every single course. On their own Juniper words: "Complete all the course modules and pass the Voucher Assessment Test with a score of 70% or higher and you will receive a 75% discount on your live exam, making it just $50 - a small investment to enhance your career."

Just giving you an example, I got six (6!) Juniper certifications spending only $350 USD - Yeah!
It's cheaper than only one "traditional Associate Level exam" of other vendors.

Using the Voucher program, I've spent:
                JNCIA-JUNOS      → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-SECURITY → $200              → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-DESIGN    → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-MIST        → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied

JNCIS-SP               → $300               → $75 after the voucher applied
                JNCIS-ENT            → $300               → $75 after the voucher applied

So, at the end of the day, I spent only $350 instead of $1400 to schedule six exams - I could save more than $1.000 dollars! 😍

For more info about Juniper Open Learning checkout: www.juniper.net/openlearning

5 - LAB preparation (physical or virtual)

Putting everything you have learned into practice is a very important step. The practical LAB helps you to enforce your understanding about the behavior of one protocol or solution, mainly to develop your CLI skills. In my opinion, this step is the complement of the fundamentals, once you've learned how the protocol works, so, now you need to know how to configure it on your preferred vendor. Thoses LABs will help you to improve your time spent during troubleshooting, I mean, you'll feel more comfortable as you continue practicing.

Actually, it looks like a video-game, it's better than my Playstation - I love opening a putty terminal, connecting into a router and starting playing some LABs.  😀

On that stage, I use three ways to prepare my practical LAB:

a) Create a LAB with real equipments - (as shown on my juniper home-lab below)

This option enables you to test some features which are not available (or with limitation) on a virtual machine. The advantage is that you can set up a lab using a legacy computer, beyond having a real behavior of everything on a packet flow. The drawback is you should have an environment with enough electrical power, space and so on.

b) Configure a Virtual LAB (using EVE-NG or GNS3)

The big advantage of virtual solutions is the capability of creating large environments with "big" routers and switches such as Juniper vMX, vQFX, vSRV and vJunos EX9200, in a few clicks. Furthermore, some 'small devices' don't have all the features like 'large device' (EX switches compared with QFX switches), so, It's easier to create a virtual lab with 10 QFX switches than buy all of them! 

My favorite solution for virtual Labs is the EVE-NG software.

In addition, in Brazil you can find some company offering LaaS (Lab as a Service) where you pay a monthly fee to gather access into a Cloud platform and there, you can create your own lab using a shared EVE-NG server.

c) Use the official Juniper vLABs

You don't need additional investment to buy new devices or deploy an EVE-NG server to practice in a LAB. Juniper Networks offers a platform with  'pre-built' topologies (like a sandbox) where you can explore some products and solutions - all for free - It's called Juniper vLabs.

There are pre-built labs for Routing, Switching, Security, Data-Center, Automation, Network Management or Standalone labs. The main advantage of this platform is that it is free and you don't need to prepare anything before, I mean, you just need to click on [Launch Lab] and start playing. The disadvantage is that all labs are fixed, I mean, you can't create your own lab or use your own topology.

In my opinion, that solution is fantastic to start putting your hands on! You don't have an excuse anymore, just do it! 😂

For more info about Juniper vLABs checkout:
https://jlabs.juniper.net/vlabs/portal/index.page

6 - Create a mind map of key topics

I strongly recommend creating a "mind map" to organize your ideas. This is another item that seems irrelevant, but it makes a big difference on the day before the exam.

The mind map is a kind of diagram for representing ideas or concepts which helps you visually develop and organize your information. You can interconnect every small note (idea) in another one, like a brain, linking all ideas to an arranged central concept.

There is no "right way" to create this mind map - some people create it using sticky or post-it notes. I've used Microsoft Visio to create mine, where I could put a lot of tips, key topics, useful commands, some specific information that I need to remember during the exam, some process that I need to follow in the right order, a tutorial, steps to configure something, etc.

The image above is a little part of one of my mind-maps used to study for exams.

7) Create 'questions and answers' for final review as exercises 
While reading my official study guide, I make some notes on it, then, I use these notes to create questions and answers as an exercise a couple of days before the exam. I also take advantage of the questions at the end of each book's chapter. Another resource is using the exercise available on each section on the training of Juniper Open Learning.

I like to make a compilation of questions to review close to the exam date, like a practice list that I needed to do when I was in college.

8) Additional material for review

Juniper offers some free certification prep sessions in your local language. Those 90 minute webcasts can help you to review all topics covered at the exam. For example, I've conducted five (5) Official Juniper webcasts in Portuguese, talking about JNCIA and JNCIS-SP exams. .

Some Final Thoughts

Hey guys,

First of all, I would like to thank Juniper's Education Services team for inviting me to share a little of my professional career. I know that these tips are not a cake recipe, I mean, some things may make sense to someone but others don't... and that's okay!

I hope that everyone can succeed and pass on your next certification exam and be able to share a photo like mine below, one of the happiest moments I've ever had in my professional life:

My last 2 cents: be consistent, resilient, no excuses and do not give up! Never ever!

If you have any questions or suggestions, I would like to share my contact details here:

Feel free to get in touch.

See you!

Lucas França
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasfrancabsd/

Btw, to generate that cool pic of badges, you can use the following URL: https://ksa.juniper.net/mycertifications/web/index.html

Great post Lucas.  You have a lot of certs so your system works.  Thanks for sharing all of this detail.  This helps me with my prep for the JNCIE DC.  I am in the study and virtual lab phase.  I will incorporate your advice in my study plan.

Thank you Lucas for sharing your journey. This is great and definitely helpful for the candidates preparing for different Juniper certifications. 

howdy! 

I'm so happy with the invitation from Juniper Networks to share my professional journey, some tips to prepare for certification exams and to help people with their professional career development. I'm happy to share all strategies and materials I've used on all my 15x Juniper certifications (That you can use for any other exams). I hope you enjoy reading this post and let me know if you have any questions. I will share my contact details at the end of the post! So, let's go!

The beginning of my journey

I confess that I don't have many memories of when I had my first experience with Computer networks and telecommunications area because my oldest memories are from 1999-2000's, when I was just 10 years old and I used helped my father, Marcelo França (in memory), who had a telecommunications company in the city of Belo Horizonte (Brazil).

I remember helping him on the weekends making a network cable, pulling cables, organizing a telecommunications rack, as well as making small technical notes such as the order of the cables (green-white, green, orange-white, blue…It was my preferred activity) and doing some notes about numeric codes to configure some Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX) servers. Also, I remember taking pieces of 50-pair CTP-APL cable to make bracelets. Really good times! 😂

These are my first course completion certificates (IT and typing) that I achieved in 2001, when I was 11yo:


My first professional experience was in 2010 when I started working as an IT assistant at a company called BH Farma, a medicine distributor in Belo Horizonte city. I was responsible for managing user profiles on Samba server, formatting computers, administering Network services such as DNS, DHCP and so on. During this time, I only had practical experience that I've acquired while helping my father, however, without any theoretical basis. Then, I realized that I was missing the main thing: The fundamentals!

So, I decided to enroll in the computer networks technical course at SENAC in Belo Horizonte. While I was studying, SENAC helped me to get my first internship and  later invited me to join as a Technical Instructor.  I've worked there for 6 years.

During this period, I needed to dedicate myself to reading and studying a lot to be able to teach new students many topics of Network and Telecommunications systems. In my opinion, studying a lot of books was an important point that made me grow professionally: I studied network fundamentals every single day for 6 years before deciding to get more certifications beyond the CCNA ITQ (for instructor).

I could acquire a solid base of knowledge there, I also won some awards and recognition as a honored teacher and some articles in Encontro magazine (2015) and FeComércio magazine (2016) talking about professional certifications:

While working there, I had two big challenges in getting some certifications: fear of failing the exam and difficulty paying for them. Perhaps the fear of failing was the biggest one, so I've decided to invest in some complementary courses. I took several training courses, participated in many conferences and events, acquired several books on different subjects such as Network, Linux, Routing and Switching, Security and some others on Network Infrastructure. In 2014, I took one of the best training courses I've ever done, it's called FreeBSD Server System Administrator (S.S.A), where I was able to learn about some equipment and solutions based on Berkeley's Unix, that includes Juniper routers.

My journey with Juniper devices

After a few days of FreeBSD training, taking advantage of the fact that I was already passionate about routers (since my days as a Cisco instructor) and I've joined at an important Brazilian Service-Provider, CEMIGTelecom (AS23106) - I continued investing in my professional career. I decided to acquire some books of Juniper Networks and I bought a new laptop to do some labs on the GNS3 platform using Junos OLIVE, an image of Juniper equipment virtualized in VMWare hypervisor.

During these three years, I've worked in two different places at the same time, at CEMIGTelecom as a Network Engineer and at SENAC as a Technical Instructor. While I 'breathed' routing and switching for those long and exhausting days, I could study Network Fundamentals in depth, spending hours reading many Study-Guide books and doing a lot of Laboratories. That helped me to develop my own checklist and strategies to prepare myself before the exams.

A few years after I decided to start studying Juniper Network even though I didn't plan on taking the risk of taking an exam, I started a hiring process where certification was decisive to me. This was the first time that Juniper Certification had opened a door. A friend, who did my referral to the Hiring Manager, told me a couple of days before: "Lucas, you need to improve your resume before I can refer you internally! the process will move forward in one week, can you get at least a JNCIA? Are you prepared to achieve at least this certification in 5 days?"

Then, I said: "Leo, I believe that I can get this certification because I've been preparing myself for 3 years. But I don't have enough money to pay for that". He said, "Ok, I'll pay for this exam for you as a gift, no worries, go ahead booking the exam". It was a mix of emotions - I was excited and afraid at the same time. Then, after a couple of hours, I decided to consult my Checklist one more time and, following its steps to organize my exam. At this time, I was sure - I'll pass the exam!  ❤️

Five days later, I was full of courage to take the exam when I finally put my insecurities aside and decided to start my journey with certifications! 🥳

By the way, I will share my way of preparing for a certification exam, so that you can apply for any certification. There are some steps that will help you to make a study's methodology and organize your materials. There is a very cool Brazilian expression for that, it's called "Pulo do Gato" - something similar to "some tips and shortcuts which you won't find on any regular books". 😀

My exam's checklist

To prepare for any certification exam I use this checklist below. I'll discuss it in depth later but in short there are just 9 items that can help you to organize your resources you will use during your studies.

            1) Choose your exam (or track) and book it.
                2) Consult the exam "Blueprint".
                3) Organize a study schedule.
                4) Organize your books and theoretical study material.
                5) LAB preparation (physical or virtual).
                6) Create a mind map of key topics.
                7) Create 'questions and answers' for final review as exercises.
                8) Extra material for review (webcast/podcast/Blog/YouTube).
               

1 - Choose your exam (or Track) and book it!

The first thing that you need to do to be motivated is choose an exam and booking it. I mean, you need to choose your exam as a target and book it even if you are not totally prepared to pass. In other words, don't wait until you are fully comfortable or totally confident because that day won't come! So, my tip is: use your credit card to pay for the exam and then, now you'll have a nice reason to be motivated! 😀

There is no "right" certification or track to start your career! Some people are more comfortable with a service-provider environment while others with security or Data-center. This step is personal and individual, as you need to choose a trail that suits you best. This step works to make you aware of all future exams that you probably will need to do to become an expert.

Every vendor has a certification track showing the path you should take. For example, if you would like to start you Juniper certification career, you can choose one of the following tracks

for more info about Tracks on Juniper Certification checkout: www.juniper.net/certification

My second tip on this step is organize your exams on a spreadsheet like Excel. For example, I organize all my exams on my Google spreadsheet, putting all necessary and important information there such as Vendor, Certification code, Level, costs, if I got a voucher for that, the status of payment (paid/saving/waiting), Results or score (pass/fail/scheduled), the exam day, the date to expire, if the exam will be on a Test-Center or online, the exact time to start the exam, some comments, links for the materials (Drive/URL/directory/Kindle) and any other information that you consider is important. Take a look on the following example of my spreadsheet:

Through this document I can keep track of the status of all certifications that I'm planning to get, besides to help me to define my personal goals. This may seem like a subtle thing, but it makes a big difference. 

2 - Consult the exam Blueprint

This is one of the most important steps because based on that, you can define if you'll need an additional resource (such as a specific book or additional training) or not.  In other words, if you already have strong experience with data-center using vendor X you probably won't need to learn all fundamentals concepts once again. So, you can keep your focus only on "New topics" of the exam.

In summary, the Blueprint document will give you a list of all content required on the exam and then, you can create a table with 3 columns: To revise (concepts or protocol behavior that works the same way for all vendors), To improve (how to configure a protocol is different from every single vendor in terms of CLI), New to learn (a protocol or service that is unique on that vendor).

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For example, for more info about blueprints on Juniper Certification checkout: www.juniper.net/certification

3 - Organize a study schedule

I consider the studies like an investment - a time and effort investment which requires dedication and professionalism. We are talking about your career, right? So, try to save at least two hours a day to stay studying. I know that it's so difficult at the beginning, however the daily consistency will make things easier. Start saving just 30 minutes per day and keep progressing a little every day. 🙂

After defining your reserved time to keep your focus studying, then, you also can organize it using a table with which content you'll study during the month. Of course, at the beginning of your career, you'll probably study just one content during a month and focus all your attention on only one exam. There is no issue with this approach.

According to my progress, analyzing the blueprints documents, I could see that two different exams (or more) share a "CORE" of content and I haven't needed to study twice for the same content. For example, for JNCIA and CCNA, many topics have the same requirements such as Network fundamentals, protocol behaviors, IPv4 and IPv6 concepts and so on. Then, after a long time I've started studying for different exams at the same time while trying to reuse both concepts in different exams. You don't need to relearn the same protocol three or four times! It saves time and time is an investment!

In this step, the main goal is to organize the content using a color scheme based on which content is more important and which you can spend more time on. Just an example:

For my example, I've organized the content based on "which is my priority content that I need to keep focus". I've organized using exam names, but you can use content like "BGP", "OSPF", "MPLS" etc.

4 - Organize your books and theoretical study material

Talking about study material, my tip is: Don't get too many books or PDFs, instead, stay with one or two books, one or two PDFs. Perform a qualitative rather than quantitative analysis on your documents. I feel lost when I have 20 or 30 sources of information to read, so I always prefer "the Official Study-Guide" for any certification exam. 

Additionally, I use four ways to organize my study material:

  a) Use an official academy - (For example Juniper Learning Portal https://learningportal.juniper.net/ )
  b) Books on my Kindle (PDFs).
  c) Paperback books - I generally prefer paper books because I like taking notes in them. 🙂
  d) URLs (some interesting Blogs or YouTube videos) - organized in Google Chrome favorites bar.

One tip more: as this stage requires an investment of money $$, I usually save part of my salary by saving it and reserving it exclusively for the educational part. Every month I save about 50 to 100 dollars (I've started saving about 10 bucks) - which will be used exclusively as my educational resource. Therefore, I use it to buy a new book, pay for specific training, or even pay for another exam. Financial organization at this stage is very important.

You can also start searching for an official and no cost resource. For example, In addition to the Papers book, I always use the Juniper Day-One books website - which is one of my favorite sources of content.

There are +75 books available for download, all for free, with content rich in details, with an operational approach, with several examples of CLI commands and use case studies. Essential for anyone studying for Juniper certifications.

For more info about DayOne Books on Juniper Certification checkout:
https://www.juniper.net/documentation/jnbooks/us/en/day-one-books


Before moving to another topic, I couldn't forget to talk about the best certification program I have ever seen, the Juniper Open Learning:

I'm not talking about the content itself (which is excellent), but I need to mention the discounted exam voucher program available on every single course. On their own Juniper words: "Complete all the course modules and pass the Voucher Assessment Test with a score of 70% or higher and you will receive a 75% discount on your live exam, making it just $50 - a small investment to enhance your career."

Just giving you an example, I got six (6!) Juniper certifications spending only $350 USD - Yeah!
It's cheaper than only one "traditional Associate Level exam" of other vendors.

Using the Voucher program, I've spent:
                JNCIA-JUNOS      → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-SECURITY → $200              → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-DESIGN    → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied
                JNCIA-MIST        → $200               → $50 after the voucher applied

JNCIS-SP               → $300               → $75 after the voucher applied
                JNCIS-ENT            → $300               → $75 after the voucher applied

So, at the end of the day, I spent only $350 instead of $1400 to schedule six exams - I could save more than $1.000 dollars! 😍

For more info about Juniper Open Learning checkout: www.juniper.net/openlearning

5 - LAB preparation (physical or virtual)

Putting everything you have learned into practice is a very important step. The practical LAB helps you to enforce your understanding about the behavior of one protocol or solution, mainly to develop your CLI skills. In my opinion, this step is the complement of the fundamentals, once you've learned how the protocol works, so, now you need to know how to configure it on your preferred vendor. Thoses LABs will help you to improve your time spent during troubleshooting, I mean, you'll feel more comfortable as you continue practicing.

Actually, it looks like a video-game, it's better than my Playstation - I love opening a putty terminal, connecting into a router and starting playing some LABs.  😀

On that stage, I use three ways to prepare my practical LAB:

a) Create a LAB with real equipments - (as shown on my juniper home-lab below)

This option enables you to test some features which are not available (or with limitation) on a virtual machine. The advantage is that you can set up a lab using a legacy computer, beyond having a real behavior of everything on a packet flow. The drawback is you should have an environment with enough electrical power, space and so on.

b) Configure a Virtual LAB (using EVE-NG or GNS3)

The big advantage of virtual solutions is the capability of creating large environments with "big" routers and switches such as Juniper vMX, vQFX, vSRV and vJunos EX9200, in a few clicks. Furthermore, some 'small devices' don't have all the features like 'large device' (EX switches compared with QFX switches), so, It's easier to create a virtual lab with 10 QFX switches than buy all of them! 

My favorite solution for virtual Labs is the EVE-NG software.

In addition, in Brazil you can find some company offering LaaS (Lab as a Service) where you pay a monthly fee to gather access into a Cloud platform and there, you can create your own lab using a shared EVE-NG server.

c) Use the official Juniper vLABs

You don't need additional investment to buy new devices or deploy an EVE-NG server to practice in a LAB. Juniper Networks offers a platform with  'pre-built' topologies (like a sandbox) where you can explore some products and solutions - all for free - It's called Juniper vLabs.

There are pre-built labs for Routing, Switching, Security, Data-Center, Automation, Network Management or Standalone labs. The main advantage of this platform is that it is free and you don't need to prepare anything before, I mean, you just need to click on [Launch Lab] and start playing. The disadvantage is that all labs are fixed, I mean, you can't create your own lab or use your own topology.

In my opinion, that solution is fantastic to start putting your hands on! You don't have an excuse anymore, just do it! 😂

For more info about Juniper vLABs checkout:
https://jlabs.juniper.net/vlabs/portal/index.page

6 - Create a mind map of key topics

I strongly recommend creating a "mind map" to organize your ideas. This is another item that seems irrelevant, but it makes a big difference on the day before the exam.

The mind map is a kind of diagram for representing ideas or concepts which helps you visually develop and organize your information. You can interconnect every small note (idea) in another one, like a brain, linking all ideas to an arranged central concept.

There is no "right way" to create this mind map - some people create it using sticky or post-it notes. I've used Microsoft Visio to create mine, where I could put a lot of tips, key topics, useful commands, some specific information that I need to remember during the exam, some process that I need to follow in the right order, a tutorial, steps to configure something, etc.

The image above is a little part of one of my mind-maps used to study for exams.

7) Create 'questions and answers' for final review as exercises 
While reading my official study guide, I make some notes on it, then, I use these notes to create questions and answers as an exercise a couple of days before the exam. I also take advantage of the questions at the end of each book's chapter. Another resource is using the exercise available on each section on the training of Juniper Open Learning.

I like to make a compilation of questions to review close to the exam date, like a practice list that I needed to do when I was in college.

8) Additional material for review

Juniper offers some free certification prep sessions in your local language. Those 90 minute webcasts can help you to review all topics covered at the exam. For example, I've conducted five (5) Official Juniper webcasts in Portuguese, talking about JNCIA and JNCIS-SP exams. .

Some Final Thoughts

Hey guys,

First of all, I would like to thank Juniper's Education Services team for inviting me to share a little of my professional career. I know that these tips are not a cake recipe, I mean, some things may make sense to someone but others don't... and that's okay!

I hope that everyone can succeed and pass on your next certification exam and be able to share a photo like mine below, one of the happiest moments I've ever had in my professional life:

My last 2 cents: be consistent, resilient, no excuses and do not give up! Never ever!

If you have any questions or suggestions, I would like to share my contact details here:

Feel free to get in touch.

See you!

Lucas França
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasfrancabsd/

Btw, to generate that cool pic of badges, you can use the following URL: https://ksa.juniper.net/mycertifications/web/index.html