Happy New Year

Like most, I have spent the time between Christmas and New Year considering my New Year’s resolutions. I love the New Year. Fresh start, time to consider what has passed and what needs to be achieved in the oncoming year. This year I decided on a couple that I will share:

1. Get down to the gym a solid 6 times a week, for at least 12 weeks
2. Buckle down and study for my upcoming CCDE attempt in February.

I’ve already broken one of these but there is a little story behind it…

Now as I have previously mentioned, I sat the CCDE exam in London on November 12th. It is a Cisco exam but it is administered by Vue and is at Vue’s Professional Testing Centre in Holborn. I know that the exam takes a really long time to mark – the exam report issued by the testing centre suggested that it would take 8 – 12 weeks. As a result, I haven’t been checking the various websites to see the update. I had pretty much decided that I had to resit the exam a few times as it was incredibly tough and almost everyone, even some guys that are top in our field and have my respect, have needed to sit this exam multiple times before passing. Yesterday, in a lull at work, I thought I would quickly check Vue’s website. At first, I thought I must be seeing my qualification exam. After a few frantic seconds worth of check / double-check, I confirmed that, as far as Vue was concerned, I had passed the Practical!

Still not sure, I logged into Cisco’s Certification Tracking website. My grade there was still taken. Clearly, this wasn’t settled. So, I posted to the official CCDE forum where Rigo and John confirmed that the update between Vue and Cisco could take some time and that the Vue site was authoritative. I should have expected the delay between Vue and Cisco because it usually takes a couple days for CCIE written exam confirmations to get through. What threw me was that Cisco marks this exam. I now think that the exam marking process is dealt with one business unit that  updates Vue and not Cisco Certification Tracking directly, as it would be done with a CCIE lab.

The upshot was, 02h30 I got up to check the status and haven’t been able to go back to bed, hence the blog post. I am really, really pleased. I will give a further update / wrapup blog in the next week, which will also include my freshly minted CCDE number. As for now, I’m off to gym to keep one of my New Year’s resolutions.