CBT Nuggets

A common first step for most new jobs is some kind of a training plan.  While employers will obviously expect you to show up with a baseline foundation of knowledge, they can't expect you to know everything on the first day.

I'm pretty fortunate in that the folks I work for have gone above and beyond to develop an onboarding program, and to insist that I not be overloaded with responsibilities before I'm given the opportunity to learn some of the basics of our trade.

The training program includes a series of lab exercises, all of which to be conducted against a fully-functioning lab network comprised of physical and virtual machines.  The exercises are designed to help me develop skills that will be directly applicable to the consulting work we do.  For example, one of the lab exercises covers nmap, a popular (if not the most popular) network discovery scanning tool.  The lab goes over basic commands, arguments/options, output formats, and how to analyze the results with command line parsing tools.

While these exercises will help me perform assessments, they've also purchased a subscription for me for the computer-based training website, 'CBT Nuggets'.  CBT nuggets has a plethora of extremely useful courses.  So far I've taken courses on basic networking, to include IPv4 subnetting, DNS basics and configuration, and network topology.

The instructors for CBT Nuggets are very enthusiastic and knowledgeable.  I can't say that I have ever been a fan of computer-based training, and I still have a little trouble after lunch (Zzzz...Zzzz), but CBT Nuggets is about as entertaining as it gets (comparitively speaking).  Not only that, but learning via CBT nuggets is very self-paced.  If I have 8 hours to allocate to training, I can go through as much content as I want in that time.  If I feel like I have a handle on something then I can move on, or if I feel like I need more time then I can just rewind.  You can even speed up and slow down the videos!  I find that I'm able to watch most of the videos at 1.6x the normal speed and still process the information.

I'm not entirely sure how much we're spending for the CBT Nuggets subscription, but I can attest that it's well worth the money.  Anyone struggling with any area of IT, and has a desire to learn and get better, should definitely check out CBT Nuggets.

https://www.cbtnuggets.com/