What is a reasonable price for CISSP Video Series

philz1982

What would you all say is a reasonable price, that you would be willing to pay for a CISSP video series? How would determine if you should use the series? What would be the most important features for it? Trying to understand how folks choose which CISSP video program they purchase.

Thanks,

-Phil

Iristheangel

It depends on how many videos and who the instructors are. I see instructors on Udemy who tend to be less well-known selling 100-150 videos for CISSP at $100-200 for the entire video series. Some of the more well-known instructors end up at Pluralsight, CBT Nuggets, INE, IPExpert, etc and most of those do a subscription model of approx $99/month. I used the videos during my CISSP as a reinforcement to what I was reading, not a main study resource since they always lack detail and honestly, I got better notes out of books. Therefore I wasn't willing to pay an arm and a leg for videos anywhere.

Personally, I think there's a lot of money to be made in the technical education field but not as much on the VODs unless you're running or employed by one of the larger companies. I think there is much much much more money to be made in technical lab workbooks, real life bootcamps, etc if you can market yourself well and get butts in the seats. A lot of people go towards more of the bigger providers because they have industry-famous names with a laundry list of expert-level certifications behind their name so the first thing you have to do is ask yourself why your material over theirs, why you as an instructor over them (i.e. how is your professional experience better? How long have you been a CISSP? What have you developed for the community? etc) and market accordingly.

philz1982

Thanks for taking the time to respond, and btw, congrats on the CCIE, just noticed you got that.

Iristheangel

Thanks. I took a weekend off and started studying for the R&S immediately after. :P I'm a student of life

philz1982

I know how that feels, seems like constant study is the way of life if you want to stay employed these days, good thing we like studying

techfiend

Even constant studying doesn't keep some employed, I'm an example as of last week. It was time to move on anyways but would have liked it to happen on my own time. I'm trying to turn it into a positive by motivating myself much more, too bad I have little control of obtaining employment.

It's too bad many companies rely so heavily on IT but consider it's upkeep and upgrades as meaningless expenses. Something that could use more marketing on the business side.

Best of luck on your education endeavors! I remember that's what you aspire to do and CISSP training looks like a great start. I personally try to stick to reading and away from Security, for now, so I can't be of much help answering your questions.

Iristheangel

Sorry to hear that happened to you, techfiend. Keep studying hard. There is a payoff to it. It stops being about keeping your job at some point and more about being so marketable that they fight to keep you because you will be getting better offers elsewhere

techfiend

The loss has definitely made me focus on marketing myself and I'm making small steps on expressing my personality through words. Had a phone interview last week that I think went well, should find out next week. I've sent my resume to any positions that were are least at an admin level or above, which was about a dozen.

Friday I sent my resume and a short but very different, for me, cover letter via craigslist. Yesterday morning I was invited to interview with the company. That was a nice confidence boost. Hopefully I can rock the interview tomorrow too, my personality and cultural fit is usually a plus. It's the 1+ year of IT being my main job that's tough to sell. This position looks a lot like my previous position with a much better company structure in a more interesting field. I'd no longer be responsible for low level issues but still near the top when it comes to infrastructure responsibility.

philz1982

What kinda job you looking for and where? I've run into the same thing, I've done so many different things that I have no more then 2 years experience in any particular area. I've given up on trying to defend my background and simply say, look I'm smart, I learn really fast, hell I studied for my CISSP in 4 days, and work really hard. If that's what you want then lets keep talking. So far hasn't worked but oh well, it will eventually.

My downfall has been being so focused on learning and neglecting the networking. I'm at the point in my career where jobs come from people knowing you and networking. You should look into your networking options, that is my primary focus in 2016.

gespenstern

I would pay none, actually never bought a video ever, I'm not a video guy. Too boring to watch, too lengthy, too much time get wasted, etc.

techfiend

Windows server/vmware admin/engineer or jr network engineer in the twin cities area. The former has many more openings and would be more lucrative because of my experience. The latter because I aspire to be an infrastructure architect in the not so distant future and network experience is going to have come from somewhere. Entry level network positions are very difficult to come across here. Not sure why, CenturyLink just opened a big NOC last year and Amazon is building some infrastructure here. If you are familiar with the area, you probably know most IT positions are in the extreme SW, I'm in the northern part. Driving to SW during traffic hour I've heard is 80 minutes on a good day, few hours on a snow day.

philz1982

Have you looked at MS? I know they are going through a massive hiring spree with Azure Cloud Architects.

shodown

philz1982 wrote: »

What kinda job you looking for and where? I've run into the same thing, I've done so many different things that I have no more then 2 years experience in any particular area. I've given up on trying to defend my background and simply say, look I'm smart, I learn really fast, hell I studied for my CISSP in 4 days, and work really hard. If that's what you want then lets keep talking. So far hasn't worked but oh well, it will eventually.

My downfall has been being so focused on learning and neglecting the networking. I'm at the point in my career where jobs come from people knowing you and networking. You should look into your networking options, that is my primary focus in 2016.

You are right networking is a huge part of getting jobs at the senior level, people want to know who you are. But I do have to ask when you are talking with people about jobs, are you mentioning you accomplishments at the job. The big thing for me, is that I want to know what work work was done, your role in the work. Why you chose that way(this answer should vary depending on your seniority), and what did it accomplish. You should be able to fit those items into some sort of job role. I hope this helps.

techfiend

I too am a very quick learner and hungry to use my knowledge while learning more. I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm moving through certs quicker than I should be, information overloading. My main motivation was to get through a BS in two terms, now that it's done my main motivation for studying is to obtain (better) employment.

Azure architect sounds interesting but it would be way above me right now. My only exposure to Azure was through MCSA labs, it wasn't a memorable experience either, kind of disliked it. I had a recruiter contact me about migrating AD to Azure with Microsoft via telecommute. I'm waiting for a reply but due to past experience with the recruiting agency my hopes aren't very high. I also had a recruiter contact me about an O365 migration position in Fargo, the pay was terrible. I visit the area occasionally and even have family I could temporary live with but it's really not a place I'd like to live.

Although I know cloud is the near future for SMB for obvious reasons and it's a great area to get into right now. It's not of much interest to me, I prefer to have control when things hit the fan. With my little experience with O365 it's kind of deflating telling someone there's absolutely nothing I can do except sit on the phone when their email goes down for hours.

philz1982

techfiend wrote: »

I too am a very quick learner and hungry to use my knowledge while learning more. I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm moving through certs quicker than I should be, information overloading. My main motivation was to get through a BS in two terms, now that it's done my main motivation for studying is to obtain (better) employment.

Azure architect sounds interesting but it would be way above me right now. My only exposure to Azure was through MCSA labs, it wasn't a memorable experience either, kind of disliked it. I had a recruiter contact me about migrating AD to Azure with Microsoft via telecommute. I'm waiting for a reply but due to past experience with the recruiting agency my hopes aren't very high. I also had a recruiter contact me about an O365 migration position in Fargo, the pay was terrible. I visit the area occasionally and even have family I could temporary live with but it's really not a place I'd like to live.

Although I know cloud is the near future for SMB for obvious reasons and it's a great area to get into right now. It's not of much interest to me, I prefer to have control when things hit the fan. With my little experience with O365 it's kind of deflating telling someone there's absolutely nothing I can do except sit on the phone when their email goes down for hours.

Well remember there is the PaaS, IaaS, and Private/Hybrid cloud options. Office 365 is a SaaS option so the lack of infrastructure depth is by design. However you can get quite deep with IaaS and some of the things you can do with Web Workers and Web Role are pretty awesome. Also, some of the streaming analytics and BI stuff on Azure is awesome.

techfiend

I have some genuine interest in private cloud. MCSE private cloud may be what I test for after ITILF, depends on where my career goes. I see Azure as a good DRP backup right now. For SMB I'd much rather be in a position that focuses on the resilience on premise as opposed to moving to the cloud. Most SMB's will still require local services like DHCP even after they migrate. I know there's a few other common services that are unavailable on Azure but I can't remember.

You sound pretty interested in Azure. Do you plan to pursue that architect role?

philz1982

I like the cloud, I've done several projects with Azure and AWS and a few with Google Cloud. I interviewed with Microsoft but haven't heard anything from them so who knows. I have a good buddy who is a CSA (Cloud Solution Architect) with Microsoft and he loves it.

My main focus is to finish my MCSE SQL DP/BI and my MCSD Web Apps and Azure SA. Once I have these done I should be in a much better position. I've considered some Red Hat certs to round out the Linux side of things.

techfiend

I see, well best of luck! Would it allow you to have more family time? That would be a big plus as you seem to travel a lot.

philz1982

Yep, it would be like 5% travel if that. All local mostly.

Danielm7

For the CISSP video question, probably not a ton. It's not that I don't think time/info is valuable, just that there is so much other material out there that a video series would have to be really different for me to pay for it. I'm studying for the same cert right now, I've used CBT Nuggets in the past, not bad, but I'm actually going through the Cybrary.it videos right now and I find I'm retaining more from there than I was from the paid CBT Nuggets videos. It doesn't hurt that I can listen to the MP3s of it during my commute as well. I think I find the instructor more relate-able as she's kind of snarky/sarcastic at times.

I haven't done any boot camp training for the CISSP, makes me wonder how different it is vs just locking yourself up for 5 days and watching the equivalent videos of the same material.

cyberguypr

I wouldn't pay for CISSP videos either. For technical stuff that benefits from hand-on activity or demos, sure. But since CISSP is so dry, I couldn't go through a whole video series. I went through most of a video bootcamp as part of my CISSP prep only because I was part of a group beta testing a specific product. Otherwise, I would've never bothered.

Hopefully you can get better feedback from people who find video more useful for their learning style.