Passing Network+ felt like a milestone I'd been working toward since I first plugged in a managed switch and realised I had no idea what I was doing. It's a broad exam — deliberately so — and getting through it forced me to actually understand the things I'd been doing by habit.

What the exam covers

Network+ sits at an interesting level. It's not just "what is an IP address" territory, but it's not deep vendor-specific config either. The domains break down roughly as:

• Networking concepts — OSI model, topologies, ports and protocols, cloud concepts
• Network implementation — switching, routing, wireless standards, virtualisation
• Network operations — monitoring, optimisation, high availability, disaster recovery
• Network security — attack types, hardening, firewalls, VPNs, zero trust
• Network troubleshooting — a methodical approach to diagnosing and fixing issues

The troubleshooting domain is where practical experience really helps. If you've actually traced a VLAN misconfiguration or chased down a duplex mismatch, those scenario questions feel familiar rather than abstract.

How I studied

I used a mix of resources over about three months alongside working through real lab environments:

Professor Messer's free course was the backbone. Clear, structured, and he covers every objective. I watched sections, then went back and took notes.

I built my own practice exam app. Partway through studying I started building a CCNA training tool — a randomised exam engine pulling from a 293-question bank, with domain-specific score breakdowns and detailed answer explanations. The act of writing the questions, categorising them by domain, and building the review flow meant I had to understand the material well enough to explain it. That process did as much for my retention as sitting practice exams ever could. It also has five guided Packet Tracer labs covering VLANs, STP, inter-VLAN routing, OSPFv2, and ACLs. Built with Next.js and TypeScript — you can read more about it here.

Packet Tracer and GNS3 for anything I could lab up. Reading about STP is one thing; watching a topology converge after you manually set bridge priorities is another.

Flashcards for ports and protocols. There's no clever trick — you just have to know that 443 is HTTPS and 3389 is RDP. Repetition works.

What surprised me

The security domain was heavier than I expected. Social engineering, attack vectors, zero trust architecture — it's not just firewalls and VPNs. CompTIA has been leaning into security across all their certs and it shows.

The performance-based questions (PBQs) at the start threw me the first time I saw them in practice. They're interactive simulations — subnetting, reading packet captures, configuring a basic topology. Time them carefully; they eat minutes if you're not ready.

What's next

Network+ validates the foundational knowledge. The next step for me is the CCNA — Cisco's associate-level cert that goes much deeper on routing protocols, IOS configuration, and enterprise switching. Where Network+ is broad, CCNA is precise.

I'm also continuing to build out this site and document the automation and web development work alongside the networking. The goal is to be someone who can design the network and build the tooling that manages it.

One cert down.