Jeremy’s IT Lab CCNA Course Review: The Best Free Resource in the Game (With One Catch)

A few years ago if you asked someone in the CCNA community where to start studying, you’d get a dozen different answers. OCG. CBT Nuggets. David Bombal. Neil Anderson. Everyone had their thing and everyone argued about it online with the energy usually reserved for console wars and barbecue regional disputes.

These days the conversation has shifted. Ask the same question in any CCNA forum or subreddit and one name comes up more than any other: Jeremy’s IT Lab. It’s free, it’s on YouTube, and it’s become the default recommendation for candidates starting from scratch. I’ve been reviewing CCNA training programs for a while now and I wanted to give it an honest look — what it does well, where it falls short, and how to get the most out of it.

Who Jeremy Actually Is

Jeremy McDowell runs Jeremy’s IT Lab on YouTube and the companion site jeremysitlab.com. He’s a network engineer who started building free CCNA content and the response was significant enough that it became his full-time focus. He’s not affiliated with Cisco, not sponsored by a major training platform, and not selling you a course that happens to have a free preview on YouTube. The full thing is just free.

That’s unusual enough to be worth saying clearly, because a lot of “free” content in the certification space is either incomplete, outdated, or a funnel to something paid. Jeremy’s course is genuinely complete coverage of the CCNA 200-301 exam objectives, updated to reflect the current exam, and it’s all sitting on YouTube for anyone to watch.

What the Course Covers

The course follows the CCNA exam objectives closely. You’re getting full coverage of network fundamentals, ethernet switching, VLANs, spanning tree, routing concepts, OSPF, first hop redundancy protocols, IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, NAT, ACLs, wireless, network security basics, and the automation and programmability domain that Cisco added in the 2020 revision. The series runs to well over 100 videos with an average length somewhere around 30 to 45 minutes each, so there’s a significant amount of content here — more than most paid courses deliver.

Each video follows a consistent structure. Jeremy introduces the concept, walks through it with diagrams he builds on screen, demonstrates it in Cisco Packet Tracer, and wraps up with a summary. The pacing is deliberate without being slow. He doesn’t rush through material to hit a runtime target and he doesn’t pad videos with unnecessary recaps. It’s just clean instruction from someone who clearly knows the subject and has thought carefully about how to explain it.

What Makes It Actually Good

The thing that separates Jeremy’s course from a lot of free content is the explanations. A lot of networking instruction — free and paid — tells you what things do without explaining why they work that way. Jeremy does both. When he covers spanning tree, you don’t just learn the port states — you understand why STP exists, what problem it’s solving, and why the protocol makes the decisions it makes. That kind of conceptual grounding is what the CCNA exam actually tests for, and it’s what makes the difference between passing and just having studied.

The Packet Tracer labs are integrated throughout rather than tacked on at the end of topics. He builds the lab as he teaches, which means you’re watching the concepts get applied in real time rather than reading a list of commands after the fact. For visual learners especially, this approach is genuinely effective.

His explanation of subnetting in particular gets consistently praised in the CCNA community. He teaches it methodically, covers both the slow careful approach for beginners and the faster mental math method for exam conditions, and doesn’t skip the binary math that a lot of instructors hand-wave past. If subnetting has been your wall, his section on it is worth watching even if you’re using a different primary resource.

The YouTube Format: Pros and Cons

Being on YouTube is both Jeremy’s biggest strength and the main thing that makes his course awkward to use as a structured study tool.

On the positive side: it’s free, it’s accessible anywhere, you can adjust playback speed, and the comment section on each video has years of questions and answers from previous students that often address exactly what you’re confused about. The community around the course is active and the corrections and clarifications surface quickly when something needs updating.

On the negative side: YouTube is not a learning management system. There’s no progress tracking, no built-in quizzes, no way to mark topics complete, and no structured path that prevents you from watching videos out of order and creating gaps in your understanding. The companion website helps with this — he has a recommended viewing order and some supplementary resources there — but you’re still largely managing your own pace and structure, which requires more discipline than a platform that does it for you.

There’s also the distraction problem that comes with any YouTube-based study plan. You’re one autoplay away from a video about something completely unrelated, and the algorithm is not optimizing for your CCNA pass date. Small thing, but worth being honest about if you know your own study habits lean toward distraction.

How It Compares to Paid Options

The honest comparison: Jeremy’s IT Lab is better than a lot of paid CCNA courses. That’s not a knock on the paid options across the board — it’s a reflection of how good the free option has become.

CBT Nuggets has production value and a polished platform experience, but the content depth has been a consistent criticism in the community for years. You can read our CBT Nuggets review for the full breakdown, but the short version is that slicker doesn’t mean better. Jeremy’s explanations are deeper than CBT Nuggets’ on most topics, and deep explanations are what the exam actually requires.

Paid options like Neil Anderson’s course on Udemy or the official Cisco Press Official Cert Guide fill different roles. The OCG is dense reference material that’s harder to learn from linearly but invaluable as a companion resource. A structured Udemy course gives you the platform features Jeremy’s YouTube format lacks. A reasonable approach that a lot of successful candidates use: Jeremy’s IT Lab as the primary teaching resource, supplemented by the OCG for deeper reading on difficult topics.

The One Catch

Here’s the part I said I’d get to. Jeremy’s IT Lab teaches you the material. That is genuinely valuable and it does it better than most alternatives. But teaching you the material is not the same as preparing you for how Cisco asks questions about the material, and those are meaningfully different things.

The CCNA 200-301 exam does not test recall. It tests application and troubleshooting. Questions present scenarios with multiple plausible answers and require you to reason through why each option is correct or incorrect in this specific situation. People fail this exam not because they don’t know networking but because they haven’t practiced thinking the way Cisco’s question writers think. That skill is not built by watching videos. It’s built by doing practice exams that reflect how the real questions work and reading explanations that break down the reasoning, not just the answer.

This is the gap that Jeremy’s course doesn’t fill and doesn’t try to. It’s a teaching resource, not an exam preparation tool. The candidates who get the most out of it combine it with serious practice exam work — and the practice resource that comes up most consistently in that context is Boson ExamSim.

Boson’s questions are harder than the real exam on purpose. The explanations are long enough to actually close the knowledge gaps the questions surface. And unlike free practice test sites that recycle the same shallow question banks, Boson’s question style genuinely mirrors the multi-layered scenario format that Cisco uses. If Jeremy’s IT Lab is where you learn the material, Boson is where you find out whether you actually understand it well enough to pass. We have a full review of Boson ExamSim on the site if you want to see what that experience actually looks like before committing.

The combination of a free comprehensive teaching resource and a serious paid practice exam tool is probably the highest value study stack available for the CCNA right now. You’re spending $99 on Boson instead of $200 to $400 on a full paid video course, and the teaching quality is comparable to or better than what you’d get from most of those courses anyway.

Who Jeremy’s IT Lab Is Best For

Candidates starting from scratch or close to it. The course builds from genuine fundamentals and doesn’t assume prior networking knowledge. If binary math makes your eyes glaze over and you’re not sure what a subnet even is, this is a reasonable place to start.

Self-directed learners who can manage their own study schedule. If you need a platform to hold your hand through a structured path, the YouTube format will work against you. But if you’re disciplined enough to follow a sequence and track your own progress, the format doesn’t matter.

People working with a limited budget. Free is free. If you’re going to spend money on one thing in your CCNA prep, spend it on practice exams. Use Jeremy for the instruction.

People who’ve tried other resources and found them shallow. If you watched a CBT Nuggets video and felt like it moved too fast or didn’t explain the why behind things, Jeremy’s approach is noticeably different. Slower, more thorough, more conceptual.

Who Might Want Something Else

Candidates who genuinely need platform structure. If you’ve tried self-directed YouTube learning before and found yourself drifting, a paid platform with progress tracking and a set curriculum might serve you better even if the content is technically inferior. The best resource is the one you actually finish.

People who learn better from text than video. The OCG or a Lammle book might suit you better as a primary resource if you find yourself rewinding videos constantly or struggling to retain information from watching. Some people just process written material differently. There’s no award for suffering through a learning format that doesn’t work for you.

Final Verdict

Jeremy’s IT Lab is the best free CCNA resource available right now, and it’s better than most paid alternatives. The instruction is thorough, the explanations are conceptually grounded, the labs are integrated well, and the course covers the full 200-301 exam objectives without gaps. For candidates building their study plan, it’s the right starting point.

The limitation is the one that’s inherent to any teaching resource: learning the material and being exam-ready are different things. The CCNA’s question format requires practice with the specific kind of reasoning Cisco tests for, and that’s not something any video course fully develops. Supplement Jeremy’s with serious practice exam work and you have a study stack that’s hard to beat at any price point.

The r/ccna community has essentially reached consensus on this combination. That’s not an accident.