- [Instructor] In this video,
our focus is on developing a study plan
to help you get ready for your CLCOR exam.
It really breaks down into three different elements.
Number one, we need to know what we're going to be tested on.
What are the exam topics listed
on the CLCOR Core exam blueprint?
We'll take a look at how to find that out.
We'll also talk about scheduling our study time.
Not just having the intent of studying,
but actually putting it on a calendar.
I always say, what gets scheduled gets done.
And then we'll talk about some options
for getting your hands dirty, and by that,
I mean getting some hands-on experience.
To begin with, let's see how we can find out
what topics we might be tested on according to Cisco.
I've created a link for you.
It's bit.ly, B-I-T.L-Y/clcor23,
because it was in 2023
that this exam blueprint was published by Cisco.
And at a high level, we have 20% of the exam
being made up of infrastructure and design,
20% on protocols, codecs, and endpoints,
15% on Cisco IOS XE gateways and media resources,
call control makes up 25%,
QoS makes up 10%, and collaboration applications,
which include Cisco Unity Connection and Webex,
that makes up 10%.
But these are high level topics.
If you want the detailed topic list,
go to bit.ly, B-I-T.L-Y/clcor23.
Now, let's talk about actually scheduling time
to do our study.
And your knowledge may vary,
but let me give you an example
of what it might look like for me.
First, I need to determine how much time a week
can I dedicate to study?
And I might think that I could carve out eight hours
of study time in a week,
but that alone is not specific enough.
You don't want to find yourself at the end of the week
and you've only put in 30 minutes of study,
so I now want to ask myself,
"Where do those eight hours come from?"
And I might say, "Well, I could get up
"an hour early every morning before work
"Monday through Friday.
"That would give me five hours.
"And then before the family gets up on Saturday morning,
"maybe I get up early and I put in
"three hours on Saturday morning.
"That would give me my eight hours of study.
"Now, how much time do I need to study?"
And again, this is going to vary student to student,
but I might guess that my study time
would include 30 hours of going through this video training.
Not that the course is 30 hours long,
but I need to anticipate that I'll be pausing,
maybe rewatching a few sections and taking notes as I go,
so 30 hours for video training.
And I also want to go through the practice questions
multiple times.
Maybe I'll dedicate 10 hours to that.
Maybe I'll dedicate 10 hours
to getting some hands-on practice.
Then I might look through that exam blueprint again
and identify any weak areas that I have.
And I want to go back and study those
or lab those up even more.
Maybe I'll spend 10 hours on those weak spots.
And the grand total,
that comes out to 60 hours of preparation.
And I've already said I could do eight hours per week,
so how many weeks are we talking about here?
Well, 60 hours divided by eight hours per week,
that gives us seven and a half weeks.
And I might want to go ahead and schedule my exam
after I come up with this number.
I might schedule it for seven and a half
or maybe eight weeks out.
That's going to gimme a couple of benefits.
Number one, if you are taking the exam on site
at a Pearson testing facility,
well, this is going to give you a better selection
of times and locations when you can take the exam.
And another benefit is this gives me
a level of accountability.
I know the day is coming when I've got to take that exam,
so personally, that would motivate me to put in
that little extra effort of study.
And thirdly, we want to get some hands-on practice.
How do we get our hands dirty with Cisco Collaboration gear?
Well, we've got a few different options.
You can go out to the Cisco DevNet Sandbox,
and I've given you the link there on screen.
You can log in with your Cisco account
or various other accounts,
and you can lease different sandboxes.
For example, there are sandboxes
at the time of this recording that run different versions
of Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
You might also explore Cisco dCloud.
If you log into Cisco dCloud,
which Cisco says they make available
to anybody that has a cisco.com login,
you can reserve a block of time
to work on some very elaborate collaboration topologies
with just about every element you can imagine,
everything from your Cisco
Unified Communications Manager to Webex.
And another way to get Webex experience
is to go to the Webex for Developer's Sandbox,
and there's the link for that,
and that's going to give you access to your own Webex account.
You'll be able to go into the control hub
and play with the different menus
and see how to set things up in Webex.
And this is not just in a sandbox.
This is publicly accessible,
so you can actually fire up a Webex client, for example,
on a laptop and log in
to your newly created Webex user account,
and you can even set up audio and video chats
and messaging between multiple users that you configure.
Personally, I've used all three of these
and I think they're all great options
for getting a hands-on practice.
So to sum up, we said that we need to do three main things
to get ready for this exam.
Number one, we need to know what the exam topics are,
and I gave you a link where you can get
a detailed PDF of those topics.
And number two, we need to schedule,
not just have the intent,
but we need to schedule our study time,
and then we need to get some hands-on practice,
and I gave you three different options for that.
And that's a look at some study strategies
for your CLCOR exam.