Mct

Ashenwelt

So... what is everyones thought on the MCT cert?

I honestly love to train people, and do so regularly, but at the same time, my company won't spring for the MCT. So I am thinking of doing it on my own.

Big question is... from a job of what is in essence a systems architect to a trainer... can you move that way without a pay cut?

eMeS

Ashenwelt wrote: »

So... what is everyones thought on the MCT cert?

I honestly love to train people, and do so regularly, but at the same time, my company won't spring for the MCT. So I am thinking of doing it on my own.

Big question is... from a job of what is in essence a systems architect to a trainer... can you move that way without a pay cut?

1st thought - It's not really a cert

2nd thought - You don't need an MCT to do Microsoft training

3rd thought - Some of the lowest daily rates in the training industry are earned by MCTs that specifically train for CPLSs using the MOC. This is with the exception of the dev trainers, who tend to earn a respectable daily rate.

4th thought - If you offer value as a trainer the money is there. The problem is many of the trainers out there are amateurs. Like anything else, there's a standard distribution with most people earning around the average. Really deliver some value and do something useful and you get to be one of the guys earning a couple of standard deviations out.

5th thought - The MOC is currently complete and total garbage, and it seems Microsoft is uninterested in fixing it at the moment. This isn't my opinion, because I mostly don't care, rather it's the opinion of the many MCTs that post on the private MCT newsgroups.

I have no idea what you make as a system architect, so it's hard to say whether you'd take a cut or not. Here's what I can tell you, I can have a MCT on any topic come do a class for us for $500-$600 per day. That's pretty much the average to high-average MCT range, and they don't work every day of the year either. I'd guess that the average MCT makes $70k per year or less

CompTIA trainers go for even less. Other training areas like IBM, Cisco, SOA, random development, ITIL, Oracle, random business skills, etc... tend to command significantly higher daily rates.

I keep my MCT active really for two reasons. First, it comes with some free stuff like Camtasia products and TechNet. Second, I get access to the MCT private newsgroups, and I landed a couple of small pieces of work from there.

The money in the training business is not so much in the delivery side of it as it is in the courseware and sales side. If you can a) sell a class, b) use your own courseware for it, and c) deliver it then that's where the real money is.

MS