Passed
Passed this morning at 100 questions around 90-95 minutes left. This community was a huge help in many ways. Thank you all.
A little background:
I’ve been furloughed due to budget constraints for almost 3 months now. Been job searching for a total of 6 months, over 300 applications and nothing. Started doubting if I was even in the right field. Job searching has been a nightmare. No feedback, getting ghosted, writing and rewriting dozens of resumes.
Been a Data Protection Officer for a small SaaS startup for 3 years. Was in US Army cyber operations for 2.5 years before that and an Infantryman for 3 years before that. So total experience in the field is just under 6 years.
Got Net+ and Sec+ several years ago, finished my BS in cybersecurity last May, I have 2 semesters left on my MS in information security management.
Decided 3 weeks ago that I was going to bite the bullet and pay for the exams and get them scheduled. Being out of work the last few months and having almost no interviews, my cybersecurity brain wasn’t exactly the freshest. Started with CRISC, studied for 5 days and crushed that one 2 weeks ago. Immediately started studying for CISSP after that.
To be honest, I spent every waking moment outside of job searching and graduate coursework studying. I spend 3 hours most days in the gym and ran videos and audio books the whole time. My recommendation if you’re busy, having something playing, even if you’re only paying attention with 20% of your brain. You’ll retain little things. My resources:
Pet Zerger videos - super helpful on the mindset and covered a solid amount of material. Watched some multiple times.
Dest Cert - MindMap videos on YouTube were great for giving a quick rundown of a lot of what you’re likely to run across.
TIA 50 hard questions - great for helping to work through questions and get to what they’re asking for.
QE CAT exams - the only thing I spent money on for studying and one of the most helpful resources for me. In all, I probably ran through around 750 of their questions including 20 right before my exam to help get my mind right. My scores for the CAT exams were roughly 430, 870, 930, 860. Don’t get discouraged if you’re struggling with those. They’re very difficult and tricky. For me, they were significantly harder than the actual exam.
One final thought from me on exam strategy: don’t focus on learning everything. Get to at least 75%. You don’t need to know everything. You don’t even need to know which answer is the right answer. You just need to know 3 answers that are the wrong ones. If you see 4 encryption types on a question and you have no idea what one is but you know the other 3 are wrong, you know the answer.
If you’ve stuck around this long, thanks again. I appreciate all of the advice, support, and study materials from this community. Any recommendations for a next cert to go for would be appreciated.