Hole in the wall tech school

Suburban Rat

I was wondering what opinions I could gather on the idea of paying for education at one of these tech type schools. I found one hole in the wall place that is offering a 12+ week program for MCTS certification training priced at 5000 buckeroos. Is that legit? Monday through Thursday with only 5 to 6 students at a time. 4-5 hour days. They offer other cert programs that are also priced close to the same. What do you guys think :::

Chris:/*

That seems like a long time for an MCTS and a lot of cash. You can get many companies to give you a week long bootcamp at $3K. That being said I am not a supporter of bootcamps. I do not believe you retain the information if that is your only method of studying. They should be used for a review after studying the material if you use them at all. Save yourself the time and money pick up the book and a copy of the OS and practice away.

Essendon

If you have that kind of cash sitting around you should invest it somewhere and not blow it away on some place that doles out ****. Seriously you could a tiny fraction of $5000 on a computer and some training materials and get WAY more bang for your buck.

Stay away from such schools. They are rip-offs.

cyberguypr

Agree with Essen. Get a nice PC for your lab, buy a couple of books and a CBT and you still won't be anywhere near half of what they want for their "course"

tbgree00

I gotta agree as well. Get the 1500 CBT subscription or just a 300 dollar nugget/trainsignal for the test you want, get a book, and lab. You can get a Dell T110 server with 4 GB ram for around 400 dollars if you catch a sale. There are free 3-6 month trials for microsoft software and sometimes it's even packed in with MSPress books.

That's the way I've done my certs. I have technet (350ish per year), the server with VMware ESXi free, and get nuggets for the test I want to take. If you're disciplined enough you can essentially "go to class" for 1.5 hours a few times a week and watch the nugget and run a lab or two about the topic. I also discuss a reward system with my wife and set it up. If I study on schedule for X weeks I can buy a new game/an expensive book/etc. I also got an iPad for the MSCA out of that!

Education should be its own reward but if you find yourself getting distracted some short term small prizes can keep you on track imo.

SteveLord

I have TechNet Plus ($379 for 2 years for me) for work and Skillsoft (buttload of online courses) through my previous military experience. However, I dropped $14k of my own money on a technical school. A waste of time considering I was deployed halfway through. Regret it to this day.