I PASSED THE TSHOOT EXAM!! - CCNP TSHOOT (I also failed)

About this video

Chuck documents failing his CCNP TSHOOT exam, then passing it on a second attempt exactly a week later. He explains why he failed the first time: he had not done dedicated routing and switching study since passing ROUTE in 2016, had not worked with it professionally for a year, set the challenge in December with about a month and a half to prepare, but did not actually study until four days before the exam, spending those days labbing all day. His first score was 834 against a passing score of 846 — a miss by 12 points. He credits two tools for getting him close and then over: Boson NetSim, whose troubleshooting tickets closely mirror the exam topology and let him actually configure fixes and get graded, and Keith Barker’s CBT Nuggets CCNP TSHOOT Hands-On Labs course, which provides a GNS3 virtual machine and ticket walkthroughs. He works through a NetSim ticket live, tracing a reachability failure hop by hop until finding that Router A was missing the interface command enabling OSPF message-digest authentication, so its neighbor adjacency never formed. For the second attempt he added Boson ExamSim to learn the exam’s look, feel, and limitations, and passed with 916. He also notes the channel won the Cisco IT Blog Awards for best video or podcast, earning a free Cisco Live pass to San Diego, and that at CBT Nuggets he is switching to building a Microsoft Azure AZ-900 course.

Key takeaways

• First TSHOOT attempt failed 834 vs. 846 passing — Chuck attributes it to not studying routing/switching since 2016 and cramming only the final four days
• Lab-based troubleshooting tickets, not just reading theory, were the decisive preparation — Boson NetSim grades labs and shows missed or extra commands
• Work tickets methodically hop by hop: verify IP/gateway, ping and trace, check routes and adjacencies — the demo fault was a missing OSPF authentication enable command on one interface
• Use an exam simulator before test day: ExamSim replicated TSHOOT’s interface and non-configurable terminal, which Chuck says made the difference on attempt two
• Second attempt one week later passed with 916, completing his CCNP after TSHOOT

Episode details: published February 2, 2019 · 22:09 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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