How do you balance studying for CISSP while working full-time?

[WebbyAria]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been planning to go for the CISSP certification but I’m finding it really tough to juggle studying along with a full-time job.

For those who’ve done it—how did you manage your time effectively? Any specific study routines or tools that helped you stay on track?

Thanks in advance.

[Spirnia]

My advice for studying for any certification exam would be:

- Take an initial practice test. Review your results. Determine your weak areas. You’ll want to allocate additional time for those areas when writing out your study schedule.

- Download and read through the free exam outline, which lists the exam objectives.

- If you are reading a book, set aside time by the page per chapter. Some chapters will be easier to get through than others. For example, set aside double the time for the cryptography portion of your studies if you are unfamiliar with the topic. Try to pace yourself at two days a chapter.

- If the material you are reading seems difficult to grasp, read sections of a book on CompTIA Security+ first.

- Print out a few calendar pages based on the timeframe you are considering for sitting for your exam. Handwrite in pencil your goal for each day and week. Leave in room for breaks each week. Leave buffers in your schedule, in case you miss a day of study. Cross off each day as it passes. Modify your schedule as needed as we know, things come up.

- If you are on a tight deadline and you have a solid background, I would use the ISC2 official online curriculum and I would do one module in two days (Leave three days for cryptography).

- If you are not on a tight deadline and are not familiar with the exam objectives, I would read a book first and view videos alongside it. Do one chapter a week (Two weeks for cryptography). Make sure you have reached competency through correctly answering review questions in a chapter before moving on to the next chapter.

- Take a comprehensive practice test that shows you your weak areas. Restudy your weak areas. Take a different comprehensive practice test. And restudy your weak areas until you have reached 85% or more competency in each exam module.

- I recommend scheduling for your exam a month in advance of your scheduled timeframe for sitting your exam. Where I live, there was extremely limited availability for scheduling my exam. Only select Pearson VUE locations are available for testing for certain high-stakes exams. If you move your scheduled exam day, you will need to pay a fee.

- I recommend purchasing a voucher with peace of mind. Then, you are not as stressed out on your exam day.

Hope you find this information helpful.

Good luck!

[nkeaton]

@WebbyAria   We all learn differently.  I try to keep mine to small chunks.  I found on practice exams that I get more out of them if do 20 - 25 questions at a time.  So I never take a full exam until the actual one.  I find that I am much more able to concentrate and benefit doing it this way.  Otherwise I get interrupted, distracted, or start to lose concentration.  I will tell you that what helped me the most was reading Luke's How to Think Like a Manager.  It really frames the mindset needed to answer the questions correctly.  I have been suggesting to anyone thinking about the CISSP to do the CC first as is the general knowledge that need for the CISSP and believe reduces a lot of the stress of taking an ISC2 exam.  I find that most people that I talk with working towards the CISSP do not have another ISC2 certification.  So the CC is no cost for most and includes self-study training and an exam voucher.  The people that I have worked with say that it really helped them to attempt it first.  It also gets a person used to the style of an ISC2 exam.  The CC is linear but is what I call one and done on questions.  You can never go back to a question.  The CISSP is like that but is adaptive.  Both have 25 beta/pre-test questions.  Also small victories are good.  Best wishes.  

[ash-pat]

I am in the same boat and finding it hard to study with my full-time job as well as home duties. One thing I don't get is CISSP has 8 domains and while studying we need to have knowledge of all those domains and don't need to know the technical/operational aspects however when trying practise exams you need to know the depth of that topic at technical level for implementing them, so the study is getting harder and don't know how much deep knowledge is enough to pass CISSP. The exam outline highlights only the topics but how much deep to go on those topics is the key. 

[Frankdatank]

I recently passed my CISSP exam.  I took an online boot camp that my work graciously allowed me to attend in January.  I tried getting as much studying as I could during the boot camp and in the 4 weeks leading up to the exam. All this while trying to manage family responsibilities with 3 kids in 3 different sports, and trying to brush up on the knowledge as much as possible.  
 I referred back to training material when I took practice tests in a domain and didn't successfully pass on the practice tests, but I stayed working on practice tests, to establish my timing for questions, and I made sure to read the justification for each wrong answer I had.

I had planned on doing both of my practice exams the night before my test, but I spent the majority of the night with my mom in the hospital (She's okay, but I needed to be there with her). While we waited for care, I took as many of the small domain tests as I could. I finished by taking some domain tests on the way to the testing center to keep it fresh in my mind, but overall, I recommend just getting as much study as you can when you can and try not to stress about it too much.  I hope this helps, I honestly thought I had failed the exam until I received the paper confirming I had passed it. Best of luck!