I am very pleased and happy to share my experience on my path to CISSP journey.
How I achieved this?
Whatever am sharing is my personal experience and how I prepared myself to this exam. So, you can develop your own strategy.
Plan
– Set timeline
– READ, Understand the concepts, READ again
– Evaluate Yourself (take 5000+ practice questions)
– Identify the gap areas (READ Again)
- Practice
– Conquer
My preparation took almost 6 months (Aug’20 – Jan-21).
I changed my mindset; I am going to take this beast. So, no more distractions and had to sacrifice and compromise on personal things ( e.g. Deactivated all my social media accounts).
Daily I spent 2 -3 hours maximum on each concept and domain Always take notes it will very useful. For most of us it would be difficult reading paragraph and may not understand the concepts, for those people I ‘d share my strategy, most of them would not have worked in the CISSP domains, it would be a new concept. In each case like that read the concept, try to apply it in real life scenario closest as possible, create or visualize those concepts, there are many videos available in the internet, see how it works and take notes. Like a high school project work, for e.g. developing a campus area or company, building a network design – Architecture(3)- topology protocols(4)- business model(8)-data(2)-operations(7). This strategy really worked for me in Domains like 8, 7, 3, & 4 which I never worked and have had hands on experience.
Books (Must READ all 2-3 times)
1. Shon Harris
2. Sybex
3. Official CBK
Practice questions ( 2 times)
1. Sybex
2. Shon Harris
3. Study Notes and Theory – Luke Ahmed ( This guy is unique from others not a normal trainer he is completely different from others. The way he created each and every video, practice questions, kind and motivating speech...! is really amazing. It really helped me to assess/evaluate where I stand, then I understood still how much depth we need to learn. Also, the way he justifies the answer for each question proves how special he is.
Special Thanks to Luke.)
4. Adam Gordon & Wentz Wu – Question of the day
5. Destination Certification, Cybrary - Youtube
After taking practicing so many questions still I was close to the passing score. But never gave up, had a mindset that I will clear the exam and it happened. Excited and filled with joys and tears having achieved this feat and dedicating to my parents for their endless love.
Thanks for your time and patience in reading my experience. I hope this will be helpful
- Ramanan