Hi and welcome to our interview with an FCX candidate series. Today we are speaking to Per Rosenlind who recently passed the 812 written exam. If you are interested in getting to know Per more, you can find his LinkedIn below.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/perrosenlind/

Andrew: Thanks for joining us today Per, to get started can you tell us a bit about your background in networking and security?

Per: I started working in network security in 2015 by a coincidence at work. We were 3 network engineers at the time and we had four distinct domains of networking to handle. Big routed and switched networks (municipality mostly), Datacenter networking, Wireless and Firewalls.
My two colleagues were already great in their domains, Routed and switched networks and DC networks, so I got stuck with the leftovers wireless and firewalls. And from there on the path down the network security path was set.

Andrew: That’s a pretty good attitude to have – taking advantage of the opportunities presented to you. I’m curious, what motivated you to pursue the NSE 8 certification?

Per: I’ve always wanted to achieve the highest certification possible regardless of brand I’ve been working with. I think that the certificate path is a great way to learn and show others that you have what it takes.

Andrew: So why Fortinet and not say Cisco with a CCIE? What drew you to the FCX certification path specifically?

Per: Just like the previous question we had people in the organization who was great with other firewall brands like Checkpoint and Cisco, but no real good Fortinet engineers. And as we had some local customers having FortiGates that’s where I started to learn more. And from that day I focused more and more on Fortinet until I one day could work full time with Fortinet related work full time.
Since I was working with so much Fortinet it came naturally to pursue the FCX (NSE8 at the time I started) just to learn more. I’ve always strived for more and to be one of the best of what I do.

Andrew: The FCX is a mammoth exam, with the written exam covering basically every Fortinet product and every conceivable situation with them. It’s not something you take on lightly. Can you tell us how long did you prepare for the written (NSE8_812) exam, and what did your study routine look like?

Per: You can say that I’ve prepared for the NSE_812 exam all my Fortinet career but in the dedicated stint to actually get it done I started by getting myself in company around others who had already taken the cert or was on the path to take it just like I was. (This is when me, you Andrew and Stephen started the FCX Study Group community) and we soon got plenty of company in there. Being able to discuss topics with your peers really gets me to understand something compared to just reading about over and over again.
After that, the biggest struggle with the 812 is that it’s so huge and the places where you need to take in information from is so widespread that it’s hard to grasp and start somewhere. So I started with refreshing a few certs in the beginning of the year which was FCSS Enterprise Firewall and FCSS Support Engineer (Had to renew to renew my certs anyway). I also took a few FCP and FCSS SecOps courses (all in the training institute). When the dedicated stint to passing the exam started I blocked 8am-12pm in my calendar every day until I passed it for study. Usually I managed to keep work away for this but sometimes focus was really hard to maintain as well so some distractions with some real world issues helped alot when it came to keep the interest up.

Andrew: What learning resources or materials did you find most helpful (e.g., Fortinet NSE Institute, hands-on labs, forums, etc.)?

Per: Basically it’s all KBs and training institute and the forums. I did not participate in any dedicated bootcamp, NSE8 course or similar.

Andrew: You mentioned that you have had a lot of prior experience with Fortinet equipment. Did you rely more on practical experience or theoretical study to prepare?

Per: The content of the 812 exam is in my opinion containing a lot of content that you usually don’t know by heart, and is just a quick google or AI prompt away, so I focused my efforts on theoretical studies and added a few labs to increase my learning curve on some topics, using the training institute labs here as well.

Andrew: Did you find that having hands-on practice helped in your preparation? Any lab environments you recommend?

Per: Training institute labs are easy to get, on point when it comes to learning the right stuff. But having my own lab also helped to figure out certain things that was easy to check in labs. For instance, which features are available in an admin VDOM compared to a traffic VDOM.

Andrew: Without breaking any NDA, how hard was the NSE8_812 exam?

Per: Challenging to say the least. It’s very detailed on alot of topics and depending on where in the world you’re currently working, you get in touch with more or less of these topics on this level. There were some surprises throughout and I found the detail level in each topic challenging – it’s a real deep dive

Andrew: Having that level of detail, I’d imagine you would need to read through each of the questions carefully before answering, and that’s got to be a bit of a time sink. How did you manage your time during the test?

Per: I’m usually quite fast at exams regardless of which one it is, either I know the answer or I don’t. First time I had around 50 minutes left after completing the initial round of answering the questions and 30 minutes to go after the review. As I progressed through the stint I got down to 70 minutes left on the clock after initial round and 55 minutes to go after review.
Note that for some reason Pearson Vue did not add my non-native English bonus minutes but I didn’t give them a hard time about it since I had time to spare..

Andrew: Thank you for your time today Per, and good luck with your study toward the FCX Lab exam!