Confessions of a Cheapskate Who Failed the CCNA (Twice)
I want to tell you about a guy named Kevin. Kevin is not a real person, but Kevin is every person. You know Kevin. You might be Kevin. I was definitely Kevin.
Kevin decided he was going to get his CCNA. Smart move. Networking jobs pay well, Cisco credentials still open doors, and the CCNA is one of those certifications that hiring managers actually look for. Kevin did his research. Kevin had a plan. Kevin’s plan was to spend as close to zero dollars as possible preparing for a $330 exam.
Let’s follow Kevin’s journey. Bring snacks.
Phase One: The Free Resource Safari
Kevin’s first move was to Google “free CCNA study materials” and open every link on the first two pages. Within 48 hours, Kevin had bookmarked 47 websites, subscribed to 12 YouTube channels, joined 4 Discord servers, downloaded 3 PDFs of questionable origin, and saved approximately 200 Reddit posts to a folder he titled “CCNA DOMINATION.”
Kevin felt productive. Kevin had not yet learned a single subnet.
Over the next two weeks, Kevin watched roughly 40 hours of free YouTube videos. Some were excellent. Some were filmed in what appeared to be a parking garage. One was 90 minutes of a guy configuring a switch while his dog barked in the background. Kevin watched the whole thing because the guy seemed confident and the dog eventually stopped.
Kevin also discovered a free practice exam site that shall remain nameless. The questions were… creative. One asked about a Cisco IOS command that hasn’t existed since 2014. Another had two correct answers but only let you pick one. A third was written in what Kevin could only describe as “English-adjacent.” Kevin scored a 78% and felt great about himself.
Reader, Kevin should not have felt great about himself.
Phase Two: The First Exam (The Humbling)
Six weeks of free resources later, Kevin scheduled his exam. He drove to the Pearson VUE testing center with the confidence of a man who had bookmarked 47 websites. He sat down. He clicked “Begin.”
Question one was fine. Question two was fine. Question three asked Kevin to drag and drop items into a network topology, and Kevin’s brain made a sound like a dial-up modem connecting. By question fifteen, Kevin was sweating in places he didn’t know could sweat. By question forty, Kevin was bargaining with a God he hadn’t spoken to since his fantasy football draft.
The simulation questions were the real gut punch. Kevin had watched someone configure VLANs on YouTube. Watching someone configure VLANs on YouTube, it turns out, is not the same as configuring VLANs. This is roughly equivalent to watching someone land a 747 on YouTube and then being handed the controls over Newark.
Kevin failed. Not by a little. The score report looked like a crime scene. Red everywhere. Kevin sat in his car for twenty minutes staring at the dashboard, contemplating whether “networking” was actually just a cruel prank the IT industry plays on optimistic people.
Total cost so far: $330 for the exam, $0 for study materials, and the last shreds of Kevin’s dignity.
Phase Three: Doubling Down on Free (The Mistake)
Did Kevin invest in proper study materials after failing? Kevin did not. Kevin went back to Reddit, asked “what am I doing wrong,” and received 48 responses, half of which contradicted each other. One commenter said Kevin needed to watch more videos. Another said videos were useless and Kevin needed to read the Cisco docs. A third commenter said Kevin should switch to cybersecurity. That commenter was later revealed to have also failed the CCNA.
Kevin found another free practice exam site. This one had even worse questions than the first, but the pass percentage was lower, which Kevin interpreted as a sign of rigor. He studied for four more weeks using a combination of free flashcard apps, a pirated PDF that was for the wrong exam version, and pure spite.
Kevin also spent an unreasonable amount of time in a Discord server arguing about whether you need to memorize port numbers. (You do. Kevin was on the wrong side of this argument.)
Phase Four: The Second Exam (The Re-Humbling)
Kevin went back to Pearson VUE. Same testing center. Same parking lot. Same guy at the front desk who almost certainly recognized him but was too professional to say anything.
Kevin failed again. Different score. Same color on the report. Red.
This time the sim questions involved troubleshooting an OSPF configuration. Kevin had studied OSPF. Kevin could explain OSPF at a cocktail party if anyone at a cocktail party ever wanted to hear about OSPF, which they absolutely do not. But actually getting into a CLI and fixing a misconfigured router? Kevin’s fingers typed commands with the confidence of a cat walking on a keyboard.
Total cost: $660 in exam fees. Zero dollars in study materials. An emerging sense that “free” was becoming the most expensive word in Kevin’s vocabulary.
Phase Five: Kevin Discovers Boson (The Turning Point)
It was a Tuesday. Kevin was once again on Reddit, this time in a thread titled “Failed CCNA twice, should I give up?” He was reading the comments to feel less alone. About twelve replies down, someone wrote something that changed Kevin’s trajectory: “I failed twice too, then I bought Boson ExSim-Max and realized I didn’t actually know anything. Their questions are harder than the real exam. If you can pass Boson, you can pass the CCNA.”
Kevin looked at the Boson ExSim-Max for CCNA page. $99 for a year. 370 questions across five full practice exams. Detailed explanations for every answer, both why the right answer is right and why the wrong answers are wrong. Simulations that mimic the actual exam environment. And a no-pass, no-pay guarantee.
Kevin had spent $660 failing. Ninety-nine dollars suddenly seemed like the deal of a lifetime.
He bought it. He took the first practice exam. He scored a 54%.
Kevin sat there looking at that 54% and felt something he hadn’t felt in months: clarity. Not the pleasant kind. The kind where you realize you’ve been driving with the parking brake on and everyone behind you has been too polite to honk. Every question he got wrong came with an explanation that didn’t just say “the answer is C.” It explained the underlying concept, cited the Cisco documentation, and walked through why each wrong answer was wrong. Kevin learned more from his incorrect answers on that first Boson exam than he had from six weeks of YouTube videos.
The second practice exam: 61%. The third: 68%. Kevin wasn’t memorizing answers. The questions were different enough across the five exams that brute-force memorization wouldn’t work even if he tried. He was actually learning networking. On purpose. For possibly the first time.
The simulation questions in Boson were harder than anything he’d seen on the real CCNA. He had to actually type commands into a simulated CLI, troubleshoot configurations, and verify output. No multiple choice safety net. Just a blank command line and the expectation that you know what you’re doing. It was terrifying and it was exactly what he needed.
By the fourth practice exam, Kevin was scoring in the mid-70s. By the fifth, he hit 82%. He went back and reviewed every question he’d ever gotten wrong. He read every explanation. He could explain OSPF neighbor states, VLAN trunking, ACL logic, and subnetting without breaking eye contact or sweating.
Phase Six: The Third Exam (The Redemption)
Same Pearson VUE. Same parking lot. Same guy at the front desk, who at this point had to be wondering whether Kevin had a loyalty card.
Kevin sat down. He clicked “Begin.” And for the first time in three attempts, the questions didn’t surprise him. They didn’t scare him. They looked like questions he’d already answered, in harder form, on Boson. The sim questions were actually less intimidating than what he’d been practicing. He finished with time left over.
Kevin passed.
He sat in his car again, in the same spot as the first two times. But this time he wasn’t staring at the dashboard. He was doing math. Two failed exams at $330 each: $660. One Boson ExSim-Max subscription: $99. Third exam: $330. Total: $1,089. If he’d bought Boson before his first attempt and passed the first time, the total would have been $429.
Kevin’s free study strategy cost him an extra $660. “Free” was the most expensive decision he made.
The Part Where I Stop Being Funny and Start Being Useful
Kevin’s story is funny because it’s absurd. It’s also funny because almost every person reading this either lived some version of it or knows someone who did.
Free resources aren’t bad. YouTube has excellent CCNA content. Reddit has genuinely helpful communities. There are good free study guides out there. But free resources have a specific limitation that no amount of bookmarking can fix: they don’t tell you what you don’t know. You can watch 100 hours of video and still have blind spots that only show up when you’re sitting in a testing center with $330 on the line.
That’s what Boson does differently. The ExSim-Max questions are written by subject matter experts and designed to be harder than the real exam. The explanations teach, not just grade. The simulations force you to type real commands, not click bubbles. And the score reports break down your performance by exam domain so you can see exactly where you’re weak before Cisco shows you on a score report you paid $330 for.
At $99 for a year of access, it’s less than a third of one exam attempt. If it saves you from even one retake, it’s paid for itself three times over. And they back it with a no-pass, no-pay guarantee, which tells you something about how confident they are in the product.
For more on how the CCNA fits into broader IT and networking career paths, Cyber Training Guide has a solid breakdown of where the certification leads after you pass.
Don’t Be Kevin
Kevin figured it out eventually. You don’t have to take the scenic route. Study with whatever free resources work for you, but when it comes time to test your readiness, spend the $99 on something that will actually tell you the truth about where you stand. Your wallet and your pride will both thank you.
And if you do fail, don’t go back to the same strategy that got you there. That’s not persistence. That’s just Kevin being Kevin.
Big Dog Cert
Alright, lemme give it to ya straight. No sugarcoating, no corporate fluff, just the real deal. I'm Mike. Fifty years on this planet, and I've done it all. I started out in IT back when "the cloud" was just what you saw out the window, worked my way through HR (yeah, I've been the guy who had to sit across the table from people and keep a straight face), and then did a stretch in sales where I learned real quick that if you can't sell yourself, nobody's buying what you're pitching. Three careers. One guy. Zero patience for textbooks that read like they were written by robots.