The starting point
I had been in the IT field for 12 years and was only in an Assistant Network Admin role. There seemed to be so many options for learning the CCNA and none were a great fit for me. I didn't want to read hundreds of pages of text. I needed something hands on.
What made it click
PingMyNetwork helped things click because it was like a game. My wife found it mentioned online and looked into it for me, she thought it could be a different way for me to grasp the material. I was making my way through videos on YouTube and felt like I wasn't progressing at the rate I wanted to get this taken care of before my 2 year anniversary as an Assistant Network Admin.
PingMyNetwork scratched the itch in my ADHD brain that loves games. It gave me a goal to work towards, and it took a lot of the information from the books and made it easier to digest. Plus, wanting to get higher on the scoreboard helped since I'm a competitive person, ha!
How long it took
I studied on and off for a couple months with YouTube videos but got really serious for about 8 weeks after buying PingMyNetwork. It did help that I had a lot of experience backing me up, I also had a home lab and worked with a lot of this stuff on a day to day basis at a small datacenter. So all in all, 4 months very loose studying, 8 weeks serious studying.
The moment I passed
I had to sit there for a few minutes and message my wife, who is the calmest, steadiest person I know. She knew I would pass because I had the knowledge, I just had to stop second guessing myself. It was a huge feeling of accomplishment.
My advice
I would tell anyone preparing today to dedicate a set amount of time each day and do it. Build yourself a routine. You need to do as much hands on work as possible and understand why something breaks and how to fix it.