After completing my Google Cybersecurity Certificate, I took a moment for some introspection and realized that the toughest parts of the course for me had been learning the OSI model. Even though I had managed to regurgitate all the information the course taught about OSI, I didn’t feel like I truly understood it. I certainly didn’t undernstand it in a way that I could explain to someone else. With that in mind, I went ahead and bought a voucher for the CompTIA Network+ and started gameplanning.
The CompTIA Network+ gets into the nitty-gritty of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model and you have to memorize and understand details all the way from Level 1, like the actually wires plugged into your desktop, all the way up to Level 7, the applications you visually interact with on the web. Networking is a bit of a wooley mammoth. It is a gargantuan subject.
Networking is a bit of a wooley mammoth. It is a gargantuan subject.
After consulting with Grok, I started by watching a course overview video from Professor Messer. Then I made a print out and read the CompTIA Network+ Objectives. The objectives not only include the subjects you need to understand, they include a long list of acronyms you need to know. So I took a couple hours and made notecards for all the acronyms. Yes, it took a couple hours - an hour and forty-five minutes to be exact. There were a lot of acronyms!
Here is my plan. I will go through the flashcards every day, every opportunity I get. And I will watch through the Professor Messer Network+ 10-009 videos, taking notes and adding flashcards along the way. When I am done doing that, I will buy Jason Dion’s practice exams and take those, studying and refining my approach each time.
There are 12 hours of content in the Professor Messer videos. I’m still working full time, so I am allowing a full week to watch all this. I might devote a second week to rewatch everything and continue working on my flashcards and reviewing my notes. We will see how things go. Otherwise, the next step is to devote a week to taking the Jason Dion practice exams, and working on the weaknesses those reveal. And finally, I will take the course the third/fourth week.
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This is a skeleton of a plan. But I’m keeping it barebones for a reason. My intuition says passing this exam comes down to drilling down into IT fundamentals and using rote-memorization to learn the concepts. I don’t expect I will need any elaborate study plans or fancy study methods. I might turn out to be wrong, in which case I will post about it here and explain what extracurricular tools I ended up adding.
Either way, this course is a means to an end. I want to understand network systems so I can understand how to secure them better, not because networks are my passion. So I am excited to have a challenge, but I am even more excited have this done and move on to my Security+. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long!
