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The lab taught me more than the exam did
An exam asks whether you recognise the answer. A lab asks whether you can produce it, which is a different skill.
I passed CCNA on the second attempt and I could not, the week after, have built the network it had asked me about. That bothered me enough to change how I studied.
The difference is recognition versus production. A multiple-choice question
puts the right answer in front of you alongside three wrong ones, and
recognising it is genuinely easier than producing it. You can recognise
switchport mode trunk for a year without once having typed it at a prompt
where getting it wrong cost you something.
So the rule I ended up with: nothing is learned until it has been broken on purpose.
Configure the trunk. Then remove VLAN 20 from the allowed list and find out
what the symptom looks like from the PC's side — not from the switch's,
because on a real incident you start at the PC. Then put it back, with
add, and notice what happens if you forget the word.
Half an hour of that beats an evening of reading, and it survives. Two years later I still remember the shape of a native VLAN mismatch because I spent forty minutes building one.
The exam is a gate and it is worth passing. It is not the thing.
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