Posts from ‘CCIE General’
Edit: The INE party will be at the Hard Rock *Hotel*, not the Hard Rock *Cafe*.
I would like to thank the over 600 people who RSVP’d for INE’s 2013 Party at the Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando during Cisco Live. Registration is closed as of today for our party but I wanted to be the first to let everyone know about the grand prize giveaway we are doing. On top of the standard giveaway prizes (iPads, MacBook Airs, AAP Memberships, Bootcamps, etc) we are giving away a Harley Davidson 2013 XL 1200X Forty-Eight to a lucky winner during our party.
On top of the Harley Davidson 2013 XL 1200X Forty-Eight we’re having a second grand prize giveaway. Details on the second grand prize giveaway will be revealed after the drawing for the winner of the Harley Davidson at the party.
As a side note I don’t personally ride anymore but that bike really does look cool when it’s all blacked out.
Tags: ccie party, Cisco Live Party
As everyone knows INE has made INC 5000′s list of fastest growing educational companies for two years running and we’re having our best year ever by roughly 30% over our 2011 numbers. With this growth INE is once again expanding. Starting mid-January 2013 INE will have a new office in RTP, NC. The office in RTP will be for sales and support so that means sales will be available starting from 6am EST (-5 GMT) in January. We’re also doubling the size of our datacenter in Reno, NV in January. We’ve signed the lease on the building next to our current Reno datacenter and are close to finalizing the RTP sales/support location. We’re looking for a mid-level rack support engineer for the RTP office location and for Reno. Hours would be from 6am to 2pm Monday through Friday for RTP and 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday for Reno. For the Reno location I’m willing to relocate the right candidate and their family within the US. These will be fulltime permanent positions.
Additionally I’m looking for four fulltime support engineers internationally. These engineers would be responsible for evenings (US time) and weekends. The ideal candidate would be located around the +1 to +6 GMT timezone (Nigeria, UAE, Egypt, India, Romania, Pakistan, etc). These will be hourly contract positions.
Without listing a bunch of standard HR type responsibilities and requirements, let me just sum these positions up. You need to be diverse in troubleshooting issues with a broad range of technologies (R&S, SP, SC, Voice, DC, Storage, Wireless, Linux, etc) to provide front line support for our rental equipment via phone, chat and email. Also you need to be able to integrate well with our existing team.
For our US locations we provide zero cost health care for you and your family plus relocation assistance. For all locations we will cover costs associated with obtaining your CCIE which includes travel, exam fees, etc. When you’re not busy answering chats, tickets, etc ideally you will be on the racks yourself studying for your CCIE. So what about pay for these positions? Pay depends upon ability and not necessarily just experience.
To apply send a cover letter and resume to jobs@ine.com. Include your salary requirements in the cover letter. After reviewing the cover letters and resumes our Support Team Manager will contact you and schedule a time to do a two hour graded assessment prior to an initial phone screen.
You all made it by far the best Cisco Live that we’ve been to thus far. We wanted to put together a video to help remember the night, and say thank you for being such great, loyal customers. We will be doing a party of at least this same magnitude next year. I say magnitude because that’s probably the best way to describe the night. This wasn’t just some low budget wings-n-beer social, we had a sushi chef, a taco stand, and top-shelf drinks being served. We actually had to have them bring in more food at one point because more people showed than we had planned for. It was a truly magnanimous party. At the peak we had 247 people on that roof (capacity was 250 at any one time). People came and went all night – and all-in-all we had almost 500 people show up for our customer appreciation party. All of INE was there, and we truly enjoyed meeting each one of you face-to-face – something that we can’t always do online. We really cannot wait to see all of you, plus many new faces at our customer appreciation party at Cisco Live next year in Orlando. If you didn’t happen to make it this year in San Diego, we certainly hope you can make it out to our event next year in 2013. Who knows, we may even do this in London or Melbourne next year as well.
By the way, stay tuned as early next week we lay out our CCIE Data Center training strategy and rack rental plans!
Tags: ccie, cisco live, Customer Appreciation, data center, networkers, Party, San Diego
Right now I’m at Cisco Live US in San Diego waiting for the World of Solutions Expo to open. Tonight is our CCIE Candidate Party at the Altitude Sky Lounge. If you haven’t RSVPed to the party yet and want to attend come find me on the expo floor and pick up a ticket.
We’re also running CCIE R&S Troubleshooting Lab Sessions for free tomorrow and Wednesday near the Cisco Live conference. If you signed up already make sure to come to the party tonight to secure your reservation.
You can also follow me on twitter at @brianmcgahan. I look forward to meeting many of you tonight!
As many of you already know I’ve been teaching our brand new Routing and Switching CCIE bootcamps for the past couple months. I’ve recently restructured the bootcamp in that mock labs are not done during the second week to allow for expanded coverage of the CCIE blueprint topics. The mock labs are now done after the bootcamp and I give every student 1500 tokens to schedule them. The new structure allows for roughly 100+ hours of hands-on demonstration using my own rack over the course of the two weeks. I start at 9am and go until roughly 8pm each night (Friday’s included). After 8pm the students usually go for dinner and start working on the labs and/or review for the next day. Every topic is covered hands-on by me during the two weeks. Students are given the R&S CCIE ATC Videos free of charge when scheduling the bootcamp because even with 100+ hours we do not have time to cover the basics.
As far as my teaching style goes Continue Reading
Tags: ccie, ccie bootcamp
Note that this announcement from Cisco is sort of a “pre-announcement” in that the official CCIE Security 4.0 change hasn’t been announced but will be really soon. This means if you want to take the v3 Security lab you should book your date ASAP.
From Cisco.com:
The Real Life of an Expert: Introducing the New CCIE Security
CCIE Security 4.0 is unusual among security certificates for its up-to-date, real-world content. It emphasizes security competency and efficient problem solving in networks that use cloud services, carry voice and multimedia traffic, and are accessed by a variety of wireless devices.
The content, currently in development, may include real-world applications that involve:
Cisco will soon announce the blueprints for the CCIE Security 4.0 written and lab exams; the first exam will take place approximately six months later.
Although there are no prerequisites for registration, Cisco offers a preparation path through its CCNA and/or CCNP Security levels, and recommends that candidates have at least three years of hands-on network security experience.
more…
Also I hope to see a few of you at the CCIE party here in London tonight. I’ll be easy to spot as I’ll probably be one of the only sober CCIE’s there 
Lastly if you’re really bored you could follow me on Twitter while I’m here at Cisco Live Europe: http://twitter.com/ccie2210
Tags: ccie, ccie blueprint, CCIE Security, ccie security lab, ccie security updates
Earlier this year we announced that we were sending out customized INE polo shirts with your name and CCIE number on them when you submitted a success story. After an overwhelming response to this program we now have over 3000 CCIEs on our Wall of Success – this is more than most other vendors combined! In fact the response has been so overwhelming that our shirt vendor has had a little trouble keeping up with the demand – after all, each of these shirts are custom made with your name and CCIE number. However please be assured that the shirts are currently shipping, and they are going out in the order in which your success story was received.
You can see a preview of what the shirt design looks like below:
For those of you that have passed the CCIE lab exam using our self-paced products, classes, or rack rentals, and you haven’t yet submitted a success story, we would like to hear from you! Even if you didn’t buy these products directly from us, but still used INE as a resource, we want to hear about it! In return for you submitting your success story we’ll ship you a customized INE polo shirt with your name and CCIE number on it. These are free of charge and we even ship them free worldwide! Visit http://www.ine.com/success-story.htm to submit your story.
If you passed the CCIE lab using our self-paced products, classes or rack rentals we would like to hear from you! In return for you submitting your success story we’ll ship you a customized INE polo shirt with your name and CCIE number on it. These are free of charge and we even ship them free worldwide!
http://www.ine.com/success-story.htm
We’ve made a big commitment to get a ton of these CCIE shirts done with a local vendor here in the Seattle area. This means we would like to hear from everyone who used our products to pass the CCIE lab even if you didn’t buy from us directly. Make sure that you spell your name as Cisco has it listed along with your CCIE number. We’ll need to verify this information with Cisco but we won’t verify that you’re in our customer database.
I would like to personally reach out and say thank you to our top IEOC community members for answering questions, helping others and making it an all around great online Cisco certification support community. The awards for the top four most active July 2011 members are:
Deepak Arora - Apple iPad 2 – 32GB
DarrellEscola - Apple iPad 2 – 16GB – Apple iPad 2 – 32GB
welshydragon - Apple iPod Touch – 32GB – Apple iPad 2 – 32GB
Lenin - Apple iPod Touch – 16GB – Apple iPad 2 – 32GB
In August we will be doing the same by giving away two more iPad 2s and two more iPod Touchs to the top four members. Contribute to the IEOC community in August and be rewarded by INE.
Brian Dennis and I attended Cisco Live! – Networkers this week, and both enjoyed the privilege of sitting down to talk privately with Yusuf Bhaiji (Program Manager over the entire CCIE program) and Ben Ng (Program Manager over the CCIE Voice track) for roughly 45 minutes. It was quite an enjoyable and spirited talk, and I believe it benefited both sides – our side to gain a better understanding of why some of the choices have been made, and theirs possibly to see things a bit more ‘through the eyes of the typical hard-studying student’. I would like to take a moment to jot down some of the highlights from our conversation, and then unpack them in a bit more detail, so that you may benefit from the open conversation.
Highlights
I’ll jot down some very simple, high-level topics that were discussed during our conversation, and then unpack them in more detail in the following section.
- Upcoming changes to every CCIE Lab Exam
- Protecting the integrity of the CCIE certification
- Robust, matured results-based grading engine
- Heuristic logic embedded into task wording
- Accuracy and detail of lab score reports
- Cisco’s CCIE Lab Delivery System and virtualization for mobile labs
- No re-reads
- CCIE Voice
- Next blueprint version expectation
- Topics for current and next blueprint versions
- CCIE Data Center
- CCIE Storage grows up
- Reason behind Cisco.com CCIE Statistics web page being removed
Tags: announcement, ccie, CCIE DC, CCIE Voice, cl11, exam, lab, strategy, study, troubleshooting
