Good morning everybody,
last 29th August I passed CISSP examination on my first attempt. I would like to share my experience, which may be useful for those who are preparing this hard challenge 🙂
I have a background of 11 years IT experience, mixing managerial positions with more security hands-on focused ones, most of them in big 4 and more recently aerospace industry.
My studying materials have been:
Sybex Official Study Guide 8th edition (8/10)
Official Practice Test 2nd edition (8/10)
Boson (9/10)
Shon Harris (7/10)
Sunflower (8/10)
Eleventh Hour CISSP (9/10)
CISSP is going to be my first certification (now I am in the endorsement process), which still made me feel more overwhelmed considering the huge amount of material included in the CBK. The day of the exam (I had the exam early in the morning) I was a bit nervous, but quite confident considering that my scores in Boson were around 80%.
As I expected, from previous opinions of exam takers in this forum, once you seat in the exam doesn't matter much how many practice test you have taken before, because none of the questions you are going to find is even similar with the ones you have practised.
In my case, I spent almost all the time (I took all 150 questions) and finally 5 minutes before the time limit the expected message saying that the exam has finished appeared. At that moment I was thinking that I failed, so I just raised my hand and got out from the examination room with the Pearson VUE staff.
After checking again my identification, I went to the Pearson VUE entry and another staff printed me the results of the exam. I was picking up my stuff, and thinking about what should I do from that moment, how to prepare again the exam, when I just took a look at the result report and I saw "Dear xxxx: Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have provisionally passed the Certified Information Security Professional (CISSP) examination". The feelings at that moment were so amazing that I almost cried of happiness!
I studied really hard for 3 months preparing this examination, but I would say that is more useful your working experience, rather than knowledge you can learn from studying.
Regards,
Isaac
