CompTIA Network+ N10-008 – Module 18: Preparing for the CompTIA Network+ Exam

1. 18.0 Preparing for the CompTIA Network+ Exam

If you took this course with the intention of earning your CompTIA network plus certification, then this module is for you, because you’re going to learn in this module how to get registered for the exam. We’ll take a look at some study strategies to get you ready to pass the exam, and I’ll give you my personal tips for showing up as your best on exam day. So join me in our next video as we see how to get registered for the network plus exam. Bye.

2. 18.1 How to Register for the Exam

In this video, we want to see how to get registered for the Network Plus exam. First we’re going to head over to the Pearson View website. We’re going to go to pearsonview. com. CompTIA and we landed the screen like this. We can sign in if you already have an account. If you’ve not yet created an account, you can do that as well. I already have an account, so I’m going to say sign in. I’ll enter my username and password and I’ll say sign in. And now I’m prompted to select an exam. I’ll say view the exams, and I’m going to select CompTIA Network Plus certification exams. And at the time of this recording, it’s prior to June 2022. Now in June 2022, this N 1007 exam, it’s going to be retired, but it’s going to be valid until that time. Also introduced September 15, 2021, is the N 1008 exam.

And let’s say that that’s the exam we’re signing up for. So I’ll click on N 1008 and at the time of this recording, you have the option of taking the exam in a testing center, or you can take it in your home or your office and testing center availability may be limited in your area. Personally, I prefer to take it at my home. I find it a lot more relaxing to be in a comfortable environment that I’m familiar with when I take the exam. Now, if you do take it in your home or in your office, you want to get logged in several minutes in advance because you’ve got work to do. You’re going to have to take a picture of your environment. You take a picture in front of your computer, in the back of your computer, on each side of the computer. The testing proctor wants to get a view of your overall room. You take a picture of yourself once you log in. You take a picture of your government issued photo ID to make sure those match up.

And you want to make sure you don’t have something like a cell phone on your desk within arm’s reach. I want to say I want to take it in my home. And they have a process you go through to test your computer to make sure that your bandwidth is sufficient, because the proctor is going to be watching you on your webcam throughout the testing process, and they will be talking to you over your computer prior to the exam getting started. You’re not going to see them, but you’ll be able to hear them. You need sufficient bandwidth to constantly stream your video to them. You can read more about what’s an acceptable space you need to have that photo ID ready, and you can watch this video that will go into more detail about what to expect on exam day.

Let’s say I’ve done all that we’ll say next we can read through the different online exam and testing policies. And if we agree with the policies. We can indicate that agreement by checking these boxes, and when we’re done, we’ll click agree. What language? I’m going to choose English. And I can select a date to take the exam. Let’s say that I want to take my exam on October the 27th. I could select that and I want times displayed in a twelve hour format with a m and P m and maybe I select 01:00 p. m. . You’ll see your contact information and you want to confirm that that is accurate. Let’s make sure that the exam date and time are as expected and they’re if everything looks good, we can say proceed to checkout. And then you would use your credit card to pay for the exam, which at the time of this recording is $338. And that’s a look at how you can go out and get registered for CompTIA’s Network Plus exam.

3. 18.2 Study Strategies

In this video, we want to take a look at some strategies for getting ready to take CompTIA’s Network Plus exam. It really comes down to three main things we need to focus on. Number one, let’s find out what we’re going to be tested on. Let’s check out CompTIA’s network plus exam blueprint. Next, let’s schedule not just have the intent of studying, but let’s actually schedule our study time on our calendar. Always say what gets scheduled gets done. And thirdly, let’s get our hands dirty. And what I mean by that is let’s get some hands on experience and we’re going to talk about how to carry out each of these in this video. Let’s begin with taking a look at the Network Plus exam objectives. You can go over to Kwtrain. com netplusojectives. That’s a shortcut link that I created that’s going to redirect you over to a page on CompTIA’s website. I just created that so it will be easy for you to get to.

But when you get to that page on CompTIA’s website, you’re going to give some information about yourself. And once you do that and you agree to their policy, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can download the exam objectives. Now, at the time of this recording, both the N 1007 and the N 1008 exams, they’re both active. You can take either one until June of 2022. At that time, N 1007, it’s going to be retired. So when I logged in earlier today to see the exam objectives, I could select between either of those exams. But let’s focus on the N 1008, the newer of the Network Plus exams. If you look at the breakdown of the major exam topics, 24% roughly is made up of network fundamentals. Here we’re talking about things like the OSI model. Network implementations make up 19%.

Here we might be talking about things such as different topologies network operations, network security, you can see the different percentages. And finally, network troubleshooting makes up a whopping at 22%. So about 46%. Nearly half of exam comes from network fundamentals combined with network troubleshooting. And this is the broad overview, but once you download the PDF from CompTIA’s website, you’re going to be able to see very, very detailed topics falling under each of these categories that you need to know for the exam. Now let’s schedule our study time. It’s one thing to say, yeah, this week I want to learn about OSPF. And then it’s the end of the week and you realize you didn’t really take the time you needed to study OSPF. So I’m a big advocate of scheduling your study time. Let’s go through a simple example. Let’s say that I were getting ready for this exam and I need to determine how many hours a week can I commit to studying? And it’s going to vary candidate to candidate. But let’s say that I think I can schedule out 8 hours of study time.

But it’s not enough just to say that because again, it comes to be the end of the week and you realize I haven’t put in my 8 hours. So let’s identify where those hours are coming from. Maybe I decide that, you know what, I could get up an hour early Monday through Friday and that would give me 5 hours a week. And then on Saturday morning, before the family gets up, I could get up a whopping 3 hours earlier. I could get 3 hours on Saturday, and then maybe I take Sunday off. That’s going to give me my 8 hours per week. Now let’s come up with an estimate of how long it’s going to take us to study. Maybe watching this video course, we’re going to spend about 20 hours or so doing that. This might involve pausing and taking some notes on topics that you’re not that familiar with. It might include skipping over videos that you are familiar with.

Maybe you’re going to get some hands on experience and you’re going to do that for about 15 hours. Maybe you build a home lab. Maybe you use a network plus lab simulator that I’m going to talk about here in just a moment. And then after you do all this, I would encourage you to look back over the objectives for the exam and identify any weak spots you think, I’m not really that sure about SDWAN technology. You might want to go back and review that in the videos. You might want to lab it up if there’s a corresponding lab. But let’s say that we spend 5 hours on our weak spots. So I think that reasonably I could get ready for this exam in about 40 hours. Again, your mileage will vary. Everybody is a little bit different, but I think I could get ready in about 40 hours. And I’ve already said that I could commit to studying 8 hours per week.

Well, 40 hours total, divided by 8 hours per week. That tells me it would take me about five weeks to get ready for this exam. That’s going to give me some guidance on when I should go out and schedule my exam date. And I recommend scheduling it well in advance. If you do this calculation and you think I can be ready in, let’s say, seven weeks in your example, I would go ahead and schedule it if you could. That’s going to do a couple of things for you that might give you some internal motivation, almost like the accountability of being ready in that many weeks. And also if you are going to a testing facility and not taking the exam in your home or office, by scheduling well in advance, you’re going to get a better selection of locations and times.

Now let’s talk about how to get that hands on experience or as I say, get your hands dirty. One option is to use non production equipment in your company and of course, that’s with management’s approval, and I’ve done that before. I’ve been able to use some company equipment with approval and build a test lab. Another option is you may want to buy a home lab. A lot of people, they’ll go on Ebay and they will buy maybe some routers and switches and set up a basic topology. Another option, maybe the simplest option is to get a hands on lab simulator targeting network plus topics. And Pearson has one that I would recommend. They have their hands on lab simulator. It comes with 75 labs. And you can go check out that hands on lab simulator at Bitlybit lynetplusim, and that product targets the N 1007 exam, but it’s also very applicable to N 1008.

Over the time you watch this recording, maybe the seven simulator is no longer available. You may want to search their site for the eight simulator. So let’s wrap up. What have we talked about in this video? We said there are three main things we need to do to get ready for this exam. Number one, let’s get to know what we’re going to be tested on. And I gave you the link to go out and download the exam objectives from CompTIA. Next, let’s don’t just have the intent of studying, let’s schedule that study time. Decide how many hours a week that you can commit to study, then determine where are those hours coming from specifically, and come up with an estimate. It can vary, but come up with an estimate of how long you think it will take you to get prepared for the exam. And finally, I recommend getting some hands on experience. And we talked about different options for that. And that’s a look at three strategies to get ready for Cop Tia’s network plus exam.

4. 18.3 What to do on Exam Day

As we prepare to wrap up our network plus course, let’s think about some strategies for exam day. What do we do on exam day? I don’t know about you, but personally I’m a nervous test taker and these are some strategies that have helped me calm my nerves and show up as my best self on exam day. My first tip is to arrive early. If you’re going to an onsite testing center as opposed to taking the exam in your home or office, you want to get there early. That way, if there is a delay in traffic, you’re not coming in there late and being all stressed out about that. Or if you are taking it from your home or office. CompTIA recommends that you log in to the testing site about 30 minutes prior to your exam time because you’re going to have work to do. Once you get logged in, you may have to provide a picture of your ID. You might have to provide a picture of your testing environment, maybe multiple pictures like the front of your computer, the back, both sides of your computer.

And you’re going to talk to the proctor a bit before the exam gets going. So get there early or log in early. And then once the exam starts, you want to monitor your pace. And I would recommend starting by determining what pace is needed. As an example, let’s say that when the exam begins, you see that you’re faced with 90 questions. And let’s say you have 90 minutes just to make the math really easy. That means that on average you should complete a question in 1 minute. Now, I say on average because some questions might involve looking through some exhibits or actually maybe doing some sort of mini simulate. So those are going to take longer and some may take just a few seconds. You’re doing a very easy multiple choice question, but over time, over an average, you should be doing about, in my example, one question per minute.

And I would recommend that once you’re about one third of the way in, maybe you’re at the 1 hour mark, you should have 30 questions done. Do you check in and see if you do? If you have more than 30 questions done, great. You’re ahead of pace, no need to speed up. But if you’re 30 minutes in and you’ve only answered 20 questions, you probably need to intentionally accelerate your pace and then start checking in about every 15 minutes for the next hour until your time is up because you do not want to run out of time. That can kill your score if you have questions left at the end of your time. And finally, I mentioned that I was a nervous test taker personally. Here’s a recommendation for beginning with confidence. Now, this is not going to teach you OSPF or BGP or how spanning tree protocol works, but it can help you show up as your best self for the exam.

There is a book recommendation I have for you. It’s called presence by Amy Cuddy. And she talks about this study at Harvard that shows if you adopt what she refers to as a power pose, that you can increase testosterone in both men and women and decrease cortisol. That is going to give you more confidence, less nervousness, and it’s going to give you the ability to answer a question without questioning yourself so much. In other words, it’s going to help you be your best self on your exam. And what I mean by a power pose is you might stand like Wonder Woman or Batman or Superman, whatever superhero that you relate to, where you’re standing with your legs spread apart and your hands on your hips, and you’re looking up with this confident smile.

She says, if you stand like that for two minutes, then after two minutes, you’ll feel more confident again. With increased testosterone actually measured and decreased cortisol. In the last few times I’ve taken an exam, be it at home or in a testing facility, I have stood in my power pose and it actually works for me. Again, I’m a nervous test taker, so this helps calm some of that nervousness before the exam begins. So those are a few final tips for what you can do on your exam day.

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