After the Exam

After you have passed the exam, you will need to gain continuing education credits each year to maintain your certification. Your certification will come up for renewal every three years, so you'll need to obtain 120 continuing education credits (CPE) or retake the exam. Retaking the exam is probably not a likely choice. These are some ways to gain CPEs to keep your certification current:

• Write a book.
• Read a book. (Only one per year can be used for credit.) This will give you a couple of credits, but not enough to keep your certification current.
• Do volunteer work that is approved by ISC2. When you are certified, you can log on to the ISC2 website for more information. A variety of volunteer work is available, including proctoring the CISSP exam.
• Attend a training class. Just about any type of technology training class is accepted, as long as it is tied to one of the domains.
• Teach a training class.
• Attend a college-level security class.

As you can see, the goal here is to help you stay current. As technology changes, we all must continue to learn to keep up the pace.

Now that we have covered some of the ways in which to assess you exam readiness, let's move on to Chapter 1, "The CISSP Certification Exam," where you will learn more about how the exam is structured and some effective test-taking strategies.