Cracking the ISC2 CC: How I achieved ISC2 Cybersecurity Certification
From Zero to Certified in Cybersecurity, my personal experience and tips to earn the CC by ISC2.
This journal entry is made to guide every newcomer in cybersecurity, trying to pursue and obtain the Certified in Cybersecurity certification by ISC2 whether being free or paid.
Currently at the moment, ISC2 is offering a way of studying this certification and exam for free, for more information visit this page. (Limited time)
Whoami.
I’m “Architekt”, my tag name on social media. I’m a Junior Cybersecurity Initiate and a TryHackMe/HackTheBox student, my current cybersecurity interests are operational security, intelligence and blue team. I have done my Certified in Cybersecurity exam couple of days ago and now I’m here to try to help you with advices and tips, guiding you to achieve and earn yours with a single attempt.
If you’re one of the lucky ones who accessed to the Certified in Cybersecurity course and exam completely free, let me be the first to say “congratulations”, you’re one step ahead on certificate and to become part of the ISC2 community.
But not everything is as easy as it seems, here I’m going to tell advices, tips and everything about the complete experience of certification.
First, the registration email and course.
When you receive your first mail of registration, it comes with different links, one of them is to redeem your course and exam voucher, the course is available in different languages, even Spanish. (and don’t forget to visit the link guide of how to link your Credly account to receive the ISC2 student badge and future badges)
Once you redeem your free curse, you are able to login in the ISC2 Learning Platform, when you choose your course, you will see the different modules of the certification course.
I’m not going to explain how to navigate through the course and how it works, the first section “Course Introduction” has a step-guide.
Every time you complete a module, you will receive a course badge (6 in total) and when you finish, you’re going to receive a last badge of finished course and you can redeem your completed course diploma with your name.
The course is easy to follow, the best assets of the course are the Lesson Questions and Flashcards, be sure to go over them, the flashcards are a very useful resource inside each module of the course.
And once you finish the course…
Once you finish, the next step is to reclaim and redeem the course coupon, the same registration email has the link to the VUE Registration page.
In the CC main page you have the “Book your exam” part which tells you the instructions to follow when you’re ready to book your exam.
The VUE page is too easy to follow, you’re not going to get confuse, just be clear on this exam’s most important instructions and personal advises:
- When you click the “Register for an exam” button, you will need to fill a form with your information, be sure you wrote the correct information, review it twice if its necessary.
- The exam is not online, depending on your country, you will need to locate a Certified VUE Test Center.
- Some Certified Centers asks you to bring two different identification documents, there is a list of primary identification documents and secondary identification documents.
- Be aware that your personal belongs are going to be collected in a safe locker, so you’d better carry only necessary things.
- Once you choose your day, you will receive different set hours to select depending of the day and availability. Once you choose an hour, you need to know that you have to show 30 minutes before the exam hour. Otherwise your exam will be cancelled due to lateness.
My personal experience.
I choose my exam on June 8th at 3:00 pm (Mexico City timezone), I arrived to Mexico City at 9:30 am, then I sticked around in some commercial streets and corporate zones to take photos, had my breakfast and take a coffe break before the exam.
I showed up to the exam at 2:10, so I was 50 minutes ahead instead of 30. They gave the option of wait until 2:30 or starting it right now, so I decided to enter and do the exam right away.
My primary identification document was my personal ID, and the secondary was my drivers license. I gave the driver license at the reception of the corporate building and my ID to the VUE Test Center reception.
When I arrived at the Test Center, They made me read a set of rules and policies of the exam and Test Center, things like “no noise, don’t copy, don’t be suspicious” rules, I think this depend of the place or Test Center.
Once I signed my consent of being recorded and done my hand scanning, I secured my bag of personal belongs and my coat in the safe locker. Then inside the test room, they checked my pant pockets to be empty, checked my glasses and scanned my hands again, then they gave me my computer and started the exam.
As the Certified in Cybersecurity says, It’s a 100 multiple choice question exam, with a duration of 120 minutes, when I finished the exam there was 80 minutes left so I took only 40 minutes.
Once you finish your exam, the Test Center is going to give you your provisional results which says that you “provisionally passed”. This is a common step of the whole process of being certificated, by now, this doesn’t mean that you are completely passed and you have to celebrate, this is just the 50% of the whole picture, this result mean that you completed the exam and now the ISC2 support is going to do a psychometric and forensic evaluation for your results, since they don’t give you a score, they evaluate your exam with different unknown parameters, but one of those is making sure that you didn’t cheated.
The same provisional results sheet says that they took normally 2–5 days to have your final results ready, but by the time I finished eating my Chinese food dish (so tasty not gonna lie) I’d received an email from the member support with my final results (2 hours after I finished my exam).
The small letters in the paper.
As you have read in the email below, the certification isn’t free at all, well it’s free, but they charge you an Anual Maintenance Fee (AMF). Let’s dive into this.
When you receive this email, you need to complete the certification process, first you need to log into your ISC2 dashboard and complete the application which is related to the ISC2 Code of Ethics, and then pay your AMF.
For newcomers, the AMF costs 50 dollars, a cheap and fair price. Your AMF membership comes with many benefits. which I’m gonna explain later.
Once you pay your AMF and the process is completed, you’re going to receive your certification in your ISC2 dashboard, which you can print and save on PDF format, and redeem your CC credential on Credly.
And now congratulations, you are now a Certified in Cybersecurity and a member of the ISC2 community thanks to your AMF.
The benefits of AMF and ISC2 membership, the CPE.
The CPE (Continuing Professional Education) allows you to continue learning about many topics of cybersecurity with student benefits.
Some opportunities are set on this page. They’re related to courses, labs, webinars, certification trainning and more. Some courses or skill builders are free to ISC2 members like us, and others have special discount or bundles.
The most important part is that you become part of the ISC2 community, and you can connect and make your own network with ISC2 professionals to choose your mentors, gurus or people you want to learn something of their knowledge or jobs.
Be aware and sure to complete many courses and resources to earn CPE points, there is a textbook about CPE guideline.
My final thoughts and advises.
My thoughts are not about the certification but the studying method.
The best practices of study I took were “Pomodoro Technique” and planning my sessions.
My Pomodoro sessions were 25 minutes studying and 5 minutes of rest to do another things or just relax. I always made myself a mug of coffee to keep me relaxed. I write keywords and their meaning to study and keep a track of different topics. I always dedicated 3–5 hours per day to study, so I made a complete Deep Focus routine each day for a whole month to study.
I recommend you to study and review the flashcards and module glossaries at the end of each module to keep a deep keyword study, it’s not important to memorize and domain the questions in the exam, it’s better to know the fundamentals of ever keyword and topic, and you need to be sure of why are you choosing that answer, not only choose it because you memorized the entire pre-made and course test. You need to know everything about the concepts and key concepts.
Completing the review exam many times helped me to familiarize with each topic of the exam and its questions, but I personally recommend you to go further and try to review the exam practice question videos.
Be clear and bold, be sure to sleep well the day before the exam. I personally recommend to take the whole day before the exam to take a break and relax, a calm mind is most important before doing a 2 hours exam.
If you study at the very exam day and the last hours before, you’re only going to put yourself in a harm situation, your mind will want to study more and more because it’s going to feel unsecure and nervous. This is why it is important to take the day before the exam as a break from studying.
Plan your study, study smart and deep focus into the course and exams, and you’re not going to need to study at the final hours or at the same exam day like me, because you’re going to be sure and confident about what you studied before.
I wish you the best of the lucks!
