Here is a video about my CISSP exam journey.
Get the full ‘My CISSP Exam Journey’ free video here.
I’ve just passed the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) Exam, which was significantly updated on 1st May 2021. In this 30-minute video I will cover:
- The official CISSP course and course guide;
- The 8 Domains of CISSP, and how to take stock of your knowledge of them;
- The official practice questions and the Study Guide;
- The CISSP Exam itself; and
- Lessons learned from my journey.
I wish you every success in your CISSP journey: it’s tough, but you can do it!
To get a full course on what’s new in all eight Domains of the CISSP Exam outline (for FREE!) Click Here.
Transcript: My CISSP Exam Journey
Hi, Everyone,
My name is Simon Di Nucci and I’ve just passed the new CISSP exam; for those of you who don’t know what that is, that’s the Certified Information Systems Security professional. It’s new because the exams have been around a long time, but the syllabus and the exam itself have undergone a significant change as of the 1st of May this year. I’m probably one of the first people to pass the new exam, which I have to tell you was a great relief because it was really it was a tough exam and it was tough preparing for it.
It was a big mountain to climb. I am very, very relieved to have passed. Now, I hope to share some lessons with you. When I mentioned that I passed on the cybersecurity groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, I got a huge response from people who appreciated how difficult it is to do this and also lots of questions. And whilst I can’t talk about the specifics of the exam, that’s not allowed, I can share some really useful lessons learned from my journey.
Introduction
So I’m going to be talking about what I did:
- The Official Course, and the Student Guide;
- How I took stock at the start of the revision process;
- How I revised using the practice questions and the Study Guide;
- Something about the exam itself; and
- Lessons learned.
The Official Course
So let’s get on with it. My journey was that two, or three years ago, the firm that I worked for decided that they wanted me to take the CISSP exam in order to improve our credibility when doing cybersecurity and my credibility.
I was sent on a five-day course which was very intense and it was the official book.is the official ISC2 course. And that was several hundred slides a day for five days. It was very intense. And as you can see, the guy that you get with a pretty hefty eight hundred pages of closely packed and high-quality material. I was taught by someone who was clearly a very experienced expert in the field.
It was a good quality course. It cost about $3,700 (Australian). I think that’s about $2,500 (US). In terms of the investment, I think it was worth it because it covered a lot of ground and I was very rusty on a lot of this stuff. It was it was a useful ‘crammer’ to get back into this stuff. As I said, [the Study Guide is] 800 pages long. I’ve done a lot of revising!
Practical Things
Let’s put that to one side. The course was very good, but of course, it takes some time out of your schedule to do it. You need the money and the support from your workplace to be able to do that. There are now online courses, which I haven’t been on, I can’t say how good they are, but they are cheaper and they’re spread out. I think you do a day or two per week for a period of several weeks.
And I think that’s got to be really good because you’re going to have more time to consolidate this huge amount of information in your head. No disrespect to the face-to-face course. It was very good. I think the online courses could be even better and a lot more accessible. That was the course. Now, I did that in November twenty nineteen and I intended to do some revision and then take the exam probably in early.
In March, April 2020, global events got in the way of that and all the exam centers were closed down. I couldn’t do that. Basically, I sort of forgot about it for a period of months. And then at the tail end of 2020, as things began to improve here in Australia at least, we’ve been very lucky here, exam centers reopened and I thought, well, I really should get back and, you know, try and schedule the exam and do some revision and get on with it.
Exam Preparation
So I did. And starting in the January of this year, I got my management agreement that I would spend one day a week working from home, revising, and that’s what I did. Given that I took the exam in the middle of May, that’s probably 18 full days of revision going through the material and I needed it. Originally, I was going to take the exam, I think, in early April, but I realized at the end of March that I was not ready and I needed more time.
So I put the exam date back to the middle of May. And it was only after I’d done that that it was announced that the syllabus of the exam was changing quite significantly. That was a, you know, extra work then. And fortunately. They. They brought out the official guide to the new exam, and I realized that quite a lot of material to learn. I went through and for example, there are eight domains in CISSP.
And for example, here’s domain number two, asset security. In the pink, I have highlighted all the new things that are in the 1st of May Edition syllabus that were not in the 2018 syllabus. and I went through all of these things and there are quite a few in almost every domain except the first one. There are significant changes. I had to do a lot of extra revision because the syllabus had changed, but nevertheless, it was doable.
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