Mark Woods, CCIE #38071

I passed my CCIR R&S exam in January 2013 with the help of the INE training materials. I got myself an All Access Pass and started watching Brian's ATC course. The ATC course is well written, expertly presented and very clear on how the technologies work. I don't believe you can succeed in the CCIE Lab by just learning how to configure Cisco switches and routers, you need to really understand the protocols and substance of the technology. In between I used the Deep Dive videos and sometimes would watch some videos from other CCIE tracks, like the MPLS from SP, to find out more about the uses of a technology. During my test I forgot the basic rule of moving on and coming back to a question. You will always feel like you've nearly solved it and it's a very difficult thing to do to move on. I worked out where something was broken and made a change to fix it but it still didn't work. I wasted 20 more minutes looking around for other faults before moving on. When I came back to the question at the end I spotted that my 'fix' contained a typo which I rectified and low and behold it started working. At that point I realized how important time management is. It saved my exam. Good luck to all.