Cisco Does Study Groups Right

If you’ve been following this blog, or reading any of my “cert advice” work for any length of time, you already know that I recommend that cert candidates should club together to form their own study groups for specific credentials, or join existing such groups as and when they can find them. That’s because a group of like-minded folks will collectively be able to solve more problems, cover more resources, and develop good study habits and techniques together than they could ever develop alone. This also explains why many cert programs likewise advocate study groups as well, and sometimes even support them. But nobody does that better right now than Cisco, as the following table will illustrate. It is taken from the Certification Study Groups page on the Cisco Learning site, where each hyperlinked cell leads to the home page for the study group for some Cisco certification (CCENT, CCDA, CCNA, …).

Cisco Certification Study Groups Matrix

What you’ll find for each study group is best illustrated by depicting the banner for one of them — I choose the biggest one (CCENT) as my example — where you find tabs for member questions and answers, information about group members, links to ongoing discussions, and links to helpful documents for study and exam preparation.

Under any tab you can filter by category to scope down the reams of info available.

These illustrations may not directly help those who are not seeking Cisco certification at the moment, but it does illustrate what’s possible in this realm, and what at least one cert sponsor is doing to support its community of certification candidates. If your sponsor doesn’t already do something like this, perhaps they should, and now you can point them to this outstanding illustration of what sponsor effort and Web pages can deliver to their candidate community!