Blog

Road to CCIE (January 2026)

I earned my CCNP Routing & Switching in 2019, back before CCNP Enterprise existed (does anybody else miss the TSHOOT exam?). At the time I was still an English teacher, waking up at 4:00 a.m. to study before work, running through flashcards on the bus and train, and then putting in a few more hours at night.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of students have learned from my courses, but I still don’t think of myself as an “expert”—not in the Cisco-certified sense (I don’t have any expert-level certs yet), and not in the broader sense either. I’ve learned a lot since 2019, but I’m still a long way from being ready for the CCIE lab. That’s the point of this blog: to document the climb—what I study, what works, what doesn’t, and what I learn along the way.