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.

So, what’s the plan? My goal this year is 1,000 study hours—probably not quite enough to be exam ready, but it should get me close enough to take a first attempt in 2027. Here’s the progress I made in January:

• January 2026 summary
  • Study hours: 48
  • Flashcards: 1,823
    • About 700 of these were made before January, so the new card count is roughly 1,123
    • As you can tell, I’m a flashcard fanatic. Any bets on how many cards I’ll have in my deck by the time I get my CCIE?

With only 48 hours of study in January, I’m not on pace to meet my goal, but I have a good excuse—I bought a house and moved! I finally got an internet connection a couple of weeks after the move, but even without that delay there was too much to take care of before and after the move to get much studying in. Of those 48 study hours, about half was spent reviewing OSPF and the other on multicast. Here are some of the resources I used:

• OSPF
  • Books:
    • CCNP Enterprise Advanced Routing ENARSI 300-410 Official Cert Guide
      • This book’s OSPF chapters give a good review of OSPF up to the CCNP level.
    • Routing TCP/IP, Volume 1, 2nd Edition
      • Slightly outdated, but a classic that is still worth studying.
  • RFCs:
    • RFC 1583 – OSPF Version 2
      • This is an older standard of OSPFv2, but is still relevant because the compatible rfc1583 command is enabled by default in IOS XE (which has some implications for route selection).
    • RFC 1587 – The OSPF NSSA Option
      • In IOS XE, compatible rfc1587 is not enabled by default, but the option is there, so it’s worth knowing the differences between this RFC and RFC 3101 (listed below).
    • RFC 2328 – OSPF Version 2
      • The current standard for OSPFv2.
    • RFC 3101 – The OSPF Not-So-Stubby Area (NSSA) Option
      • The current standard for NSSAs.
    • RFC 5340 – OSPF for IPv6
      • The current standard for OSPFv3.
  • Videos/Others:
    • OSPF for the Real World – From Zero to Hero
      • This course from Ed Harmoush is a great review of the basics of OSPF: LSA types, area types, etc.
    • NetworkLessons.com OSPF course
      • NetworkLessons.com is one of the best networking resources out there – well worth the money!
• Multicast
  • RFCs:
    • RFC 2236 – Internet Group Management Protocol, Version 2
    • RFC 3973 – Protocol Independent Multicast – Dense Mode (PIM-DM): Protocol Specification (Revised)
    • RFC 4541 – Considerations for Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) Snooping Switches
    • RFC 7761 – Protocol Independent Multicast – Sparse Mode (PIM-SM): Protocol Specification (Revised)
    • RFC 9776 – Internet Group Management Protocol, Version 3
  • Videos/Others:
    • CCIE/JNCIE IP Multicast Lecture Series
      • This is a fantastic playlist on YouTube to get familiar with multicast. Make sure to refer to the RFCs listed above as you watch it.
    • NetworkLessons.com Multicast course

I’m not done with either of these topics—I prefer to spend at most a few weeks on each topic before moving on to the next. When I return to OSPF and multicast in the future I’ll dig even deeper into the RFCs and use some other books that I didn’t have the time to get to this time around.

The goal for this year is not necessarily to get exam-ready for any of the exam topics, but to get maybe 80% of the way there. Then I’ll attend a few bootcamps for final preparation and attempt the lab exam! See you in a month for an update on my progress in February.