Giosafatte Colamaria LinkedIn Profile
The starting point
I currently work as a network administrator, managing Cisco environments, including ACI technology and Juniper. I earned my CCNA certification mainly to formalize skills I'd already developed on the job, and to fill in some gaps in areas of Cisco I used less often.
Before PingMyNetwork, I prepared using books, videos, and official Cisco courses, but it wasn't a productive approach:
The theory was dense and disconnected from real practice: I understood the concept, but I didn't always know how it translated into an actual command on the device.
The videos were very passive: I'd watch someone configure something, but if I didn't redo the exercise myself, nothing really stuck.
Official courses lacked pacing: They were built for an "average" audience, so at times they were too slow on things I already knew and too fast on others.
The most frustrating part, overall, was the difficulty figuring out, across all these sources, what was actually exam material and what was excess trivia. What was missing was a guided, structured path that combined theory and practice in one place.
What made it click
I'd been searching online for a while for something like Hack The Box or TryHackMe, but for networking. After a long search, I finally found PingMyNetwork, and it was exactly what I'd been missing.
With PingMyNetwork, I found that exact learning system: complex concepts finally made understandable, without roundabout explanations or superfluous detail that you forget right away and truly excellent hands-on labs. It was the turning point: theory and practice finally in one place, without all the background noise I'd found everywhere else before.
Since I work every day, I had to study in my free time. With PingMyNetwork, though, I never hit a wall or lost motivation. It's the kind of platform that makes you want to keep learning, even when you come home tired after a full day of work.
How long it took
Balancing study with a full-time job naturally made the overall process longer compared to someone studying full-time. But with the right practical approach, I kept moving forward without losing momentum.
The moment I passed
When I saw "PASSED" on the screen, it was an enormous sense of satisfaction.
It wasn't just the finish line of an exam, it was confirmation that all that time stolen from rest, after full days of work, had finally paid off. In that moment I realized that was exactly the right path: practical, straightforward study, no fluff, exactly the method I'd found with PingMyNetwork.
My advice
The most honest advice I can give is to actually study for it, with no shortcuts: avoid exam dumps.
Not just because they risk invalidating the certification, but because they empty the whole process of meaning, you end up with a piece of paper without the skills that paper is supposed to guarantee. It's better to take a longer path built on real theory and practice, which then translates into what you can actually do in the field.
What's next
I'm aiming for the CCNP, with a particular focus on ACI, to further deepen my knowledge of the enterprise technologies I work with every day, sticking with the same practical approach that worked for me with PMN.