The 800-150 FLDTEC exam runs 120 minutes and leads to the Cisco Certified Technician (CCT) Field Technician certification — the credential Cisco built in early 2025 to replace three older, narrower field-tech exams. That consolidation matters for how you should prepare: this single exam now pulls in routing and switching, data center, UCS, and collaboration content that used to be split across separate tests, so the question pool is broader than a typical associate-level Cisco exam even though the certification itself sits at a technician level, not an engineering one.
Cisco uses performance-based testing for this exam, which means the exact number of questions you’ll see isn’t fixed or published — it can vary from one delivery to the next. Don’t treat a practice test’s question count as a benchmark for the thing; treat the domain weightings below as the benchmark instead. Cisco also doesn’t publish a passing score for 800-150, as is standard across its certification exams — it’s a scaled score, not a flat percentage, so “I got 75% on this practice set” doesn’t map directly to pass/fail on exam day.
Expect a mix of straight recall (identify this cable, name this port) and situational judgment questions that put you in a field scenario: a customer’s switch won’t boot after a firmware update, which steps do you take first. The hardware-replacement domain in particular leans heavily on “what’s the correct sequence” style questions rather than pure definitions.
Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
1.0 Networking Foundations | 20% |
2.0 Common Service Tasks and Tools | 15% |
3.0 Cisco Software | 10% |
4.0 Cisco Infrastructure and Collaboration Architecture | 10% |
5.0 Cisco Hardware Replacement | 35% |
6.0 Cisco UCS and Data Center Architecture | 10% |
Domain 5.0 alone is worth more than domains 3 and 4 combined, which tells you where Cisco actually expects your time to go. If you’re budgeting study hours by domain weight — which you should — hardware replacement across Catalyst, Nexus, MDS, ASR, ISR, Secure Firewall, and the full UCS B/C/E/X-Series lineup deserves more hours than any other single topic.
Three areas trip people up more than the blueprint percentages suggest:
NX-OS boot modes and password recovery. This sits inside the 35%-weighted hardware domain but gets studied like an afterthought because candidates assume “I know IOS, NX-OS is basically the same.” The CLI overlaps, but NX-OS’s operating modes, ACI boot behavior, and password recovery sequence are genuinely different enough to cost points if you only crammed IOS.
UCS chassis-to-server mapping. Knowing that UCS exists isn’t the same as knowing which replacement procedure applies to a 5108 Blade Server Chassis versus an X9508 Server Chassis, or distinguishing B-Series from C-Series and E-Series hardware by sight and by replacement process. This shows up in both domain 5.0 and domain 6.0, so weak UCS knowledge costs you twice.
Collaboration call flow basics. Candidates coming from a routing/switching background often skip the collaboration section (Cisco UCM, call signaling, Webex Calling and Control Hub) because it feels outside their comfort zone — but it’s 10% of the exam and tested with the same scenario-based format as everything else.
Because 800-150 mixes recall questions with field-scenario judgment calls, running through practice questions once and memorizing the right letter doesn’t transfer well. Two things help more:
Work questions by domain, not randomly, at least for your first pass — go deep on hardware replacement questions specifically, since that’s where the exam concentrates its weight and where sequencing errors (missing a safety or ESD step, replacing the wrong component first) are easy to make under time pressure.
When you miss a scenario question, don’t just note the correct answer — work out why the distractors were wrong. A question about a failed firmware upgrade usually has one distractor that would work on a different device family (say, an IOS answer on an NX-OS question). Catching that pattern teaches you to read which platform a question is actually about before you answer, which is the skill being tested.
Treating this as a pure recall exam and skipping scenario-based practice, then getting stuck when a question describes symptoms instead of asking a direct definition.
Under-preparing on UCS and data center content because it feels like a smaller, separate specialty — it’s 45% of the exam when you combine domains 5.0’s UCS replacement items with domain 6.0.
Confusing procedures across platforms — applying an IOS troubleshooting step to an NX-OS device, or mixing up Catalyst and Nexus replacement sequences.
Skipping the safety and ESD-protocol content in 5.1 because it seems too basic to study — it’s still tested, and it’s an easy point to lose through overconfidence.
New to Cisco hardware (no prior field or lab experience): Budget 6–8 weeks. Start with the OSI/TCP-IP and cabling fundamentals in domain 1.0 before touching hardware-specific content — the later domains assume you’re already comfortable with basic networking concepts.
Has related experience (CCNA-level knowledge, or hands-on with some Cisco gear already): 2–4 weeks is usually . Your gap is more likely to be breadth — UCS and collaboration content if your background is routing/switching, or vice versa — than fundamentals. Spend your time filling those specific holes rather than re-studying what you already know.
Retaking the exam: Before scheduling again, pin down which domain cost you the most points if you have that feedback, and go back to source material for that domain specifically rather than re-running the same general practice sets. Retakers who fail a second time often failed the same domain both times.
800-150 itself is still relatively new — it went live February 10, 2025, replacing three older exams (CLTECH, DCTECH, and RSTECH) that used to cover collaboration, data center, and routing/switching field support separately. Because it consolidated three exam blueprints into one, expect Cisco to keep refining which topics get emphasis as the exam matures; Cisco states its exam topic guidelines “may change at any time without notice” to reflect current product lines, and with a newly merged exam like this one, that’s more than boilerplate. Check the current blueprint shortly before you schedule, rather than relying on notes from months earlier.
Last updated on Oct, 15 2026
