I recently passed my CCNA, this was the most challenging certification so far and it did require more work compared to other courses I have followed until now.
What I did was:
- to follow Neil Anderson’s course on Udemy and his command line exercises.
- to subscribe to what Neil recommends which is Alpha Prep; I did probably 750 questions out of thousands, so quite a lot, yet the Alpha prep report was telling me that I was not ready, and I did not just simply went through the questions, I was really going at it, at each wrong answer I would go back to packet tracer and try to figure it out. After a while I eventually got bored and missed the fun of the labs.
- to get David Bombal’s packet tracer lab exercises and did them all; these were excellent and entertaining, also foundational in my ability to pass.
It took me in total 4 months (~ 80 hours) until I had the courage to show up to the exam room, I was fully confident on the day on my ability to pass the certification, I started the test and instantly realised that the CCNA actually deserved its reputation: questions and labs were challenging but thankfully I got a pass after the two hours.
To conclude, there is a lot of information on this one you have to memorise to be successful and it will take you a lot of hands on practice, but it is largely doable as long as your are not in a rush, take your time so you can truly grasp the concepts. I absolutely recommended the CCNA and I can tell I already started to benefit from it in my professional life: I can now follow hardware, cluster networking, and performance conversations, at least to a degree.