This week I was in Sydney Australia for a week particularly at the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise headquarters. I was there to attend a course on their switch, wireless and management platform.
I have gone through training courses from the past from other vendors where what would usually be a 3-day course is compressed into a days course. Like this one, the switching course originally was a 5 day course compressed into a day while the wireless and management course a 3-day course jammed packed into one. Well in my case, the wireless course only for 4 hours as I had to fly back to Brisbane that afternoon and to duct traffic had to leave shortly after lunch and by-passed most of the labs.
The week course also included a certification exam which is the Alcatel-Lucent Field Engineer LAN (ACFE) which is their equivalent of Cisco’s CCNA RS. So imagine, for 3.5 days had to cram all these information about a certain vendor including their wireless technology and taking an exam after it.
I told myself, sure how hard can it be. I relied on my experience and fundamentals thinking that it would carry me through to another vendor certification under my belt. Well, in summary it was like the BCNE experience. I failed! Not miserably in comparible to the Brocade exam but I still failed. Passing score was 75% and I got 63%. Exam was 45mins and can be done from home. Yes it was open book, google all you want and what did I do? I winged it and hit the ground face first with a shameful story to write as a blog post.
I have emailed Alcatel in the hopes that I would be granted another attempt and this time would have to go through all 900+ pages of the material to make sure I don’t do it again. Definitely the guys at work would be asking me about it come Monday and dredding to tell all about it. Oh well…
Running-Config 