CCIE Roadmaps, Topics, and Blueprints

I’ve been looking at ways that people prepare for the CCIE Routing and Switch lab. While reviewing the Cisco Learning Network (CLN) site, I noticed that there were actually two official blueprints of topics for version 4.0 of the lab on CLN – DOC-4375 “CCIE Routing and Switching Lab Exam Topics (Blueprint) v4.0” and DOC-6864 “CCIE Routing and Switching Lab Exam Checklist”.

Both documents appear to be useful. For example:

• DOC-4375 is a more high level blueprint, includes 128 items, and maps exactly to the first 128 items on the R&S CCIE Written v4.0 blueprint. (DOC-4374 is the CCIE ® Routing and Switching Written Exam Topics (Blueprint) v4.0 blueprint, and includes one additional section on “Evaluate Proposed Changes to a Network”).
• DOC-6864 is an expansion of many of the DOC-4375 topics, and according to CLN, is meant as a supplement to the existing blueprint. DOC-6864 has 308 topics.

I decided to combine the two blueprints/roadmaps/checklists to see how much overlap they had. I color coded all the information, sorted the topics into one big spreadsheet using DOC-4375 to determine order, pulled out the duplicates, and ended up with about 390 topics. (For example:

Numbering and topics from the DOC-4375 blueprint are shown in blue, numbering and expanded topics from the DOC-6864 checklist are shown in red. When a topic appears on both blueprints, it is typically shown in purple.)

The mapping was pretty easy, however I found that posting a really large table in a blog while preserving my formats turned out to be really hard.

— cwr

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ps – I also posted a related blog on CCIE Lab Preparation and Soft Skills