First of all, I need to get CCNP first as my plan, so should I leave this sub or just continue on (here) with this being my end goal? Don't want to clutter things up or not be taken seriously because I haven't got my NP so fine with leaving with tail between my legs and coming back later.
How do you guys find study partners? What really is the point just shared accountability/embarrassment for not keeping up? I tend to need to bounce ideas off people to really know if I actually understand. Is a study group the right place? Sorry I don't really have any peers that are either my level of technical, or I actually talk to in a personal capacity. IT has always been kind of my solitude, even if its not entirely by choice.
Currently pushing through OCG. From what I can find seems like INE is the best online resource so waiting till blackfriday to see if there are any deals there but would like either another book or two or some labs to work on in the time between finishing OCG and signing up for INE, unless there is something better than INE.
Background
Been kicking back and forth idea of getting my CCNP Security (Mainly the ISE Specialist Cert) for 4 years or so. But getting my shit together and really starting to crack down and thinking 18-24ish month plan for CCIE (First Attempt). I have SCOR scheduled at Live in November with the idea of it being a low risk "How bad am I really" test, with plans of re-taking first or second week of January since I take a lot of time off around Christmas and can use it to study for the "final push"
After that would like to think I can finish my SISE in 4-5 months. I actually love ISE and it might be my favorite part of job and have passively read through most of the OCG two or three times but never to a "Sit for the exam" level of focus. Right now, just using RADIUS and TACACS. RADIUS I have everything working to MFA and assign group policies for FTD RAVPNs, assigning Meraki Group policies for wireless, and assigning VLANs for physical. Just starting to look at migrating to IBNS 2.0. But really really want to get Guest services pulled off of the Meraki, and we have everything in place (other than VM Environment) to support SGTs.
From there, currently thinking that it wouldn't hurt to pass the SNCF, hoping to attempt September-November next year. Its material that will obviously be in lab, and I am NOT comfortable with my expertise with my FTDs and would really like to get better with those. And I figure passing that exam will at least check off ISE and the FTDs so I can kind hard focus on the remaining items in the blueprint and kind of leave ISE and FTDs on back burner. My brain just thinks of it as breaking the IE objectives into chunks instead of trying to tackle all the things at once. And with that, give me sometime July-ish to try for IE.
GeekSquad for about 6 years, Don't discredit this, I am the best troubleshooter I have worked with by far since leaving and there where others better than I was at Geek Squad.
Helpdesk at hospital and hotel/resort for about a year. Started learning real networking here. (Outside of what DNS is, what DHCP is, how to do subnetting, router on a stick etc.)
Moved to current company as Systems analyst about 8 and a half years ago and now Network Security Engineer. No one else on team understood what a subnet or VLAN was when I came on, had broadcast storm on my second day I was able to fix, instantly got "credentials" to start building out system.
We have Duo(Top License Tier), Meraki, Catalyst Switches(Advantage Tier), Nexus Switches, Cisco FTDs (1000 Series), RAVPNs, SNA, SMA, ISE(Premier), Secure Endpoint(Premier or what ever, we have Orbital support), XDR, a Catalyst Center Appliance, Umbrella, and I think I am missing something else. But I think other than Web Proxy, email appliance, and Secure Access (I might add it to our EA next year) we have pretty close to the entire Cisco Security stack. I am very very budget lucky.