The attractions of an accelerated tech training course are obvious. Why spend weeks or months reading boring computer books or lurching through online courseware when you can have high-energy instructors helping you to cram all that information in over a single long weekend?
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Nicknamed boot camps for their abbreviated length and grueling methods — 12 hours in class per day, along with assigned homework at night, is not unusual — some even have students taking certification exams by weekend’s end — and still boast a respectable pass rate.
Unsurprisingly, a number of boot camps aimed at training both system administrators and end users in Vista and Office 2007 are starting to spring up.
The courses aren’t cheap. Prices typically start at more than $1,000 for a long weekend’s course, and the costs go up rapidly from. But some experts see value in these crash courses. IT boot camps “are very helpful to get a team up to speed prior to a software deployment,” said Cushing Anderson, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.
A constellation of camps
Training Camp, the boot camp division of TechTrain, will begin offering Vista boot camps in June with a three-day course aimed at helping Microsoft Certified Technology Specialists (MCTS) pass the certification exam for configuring Vista.
Jeff Porch, director of educational services at Philadelphia-based Training Camp, says the $2,195 course is aimed at people who provide IT support, both in person and via call centers.
All of the instructors employed by Training Camp are Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCT). Classes are limited to 10 students, allowing them to get a lot of one-on-one attention, Porch said. They are also worked hard. “The camp will run from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., with an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner,” Porch said.
Training Camp is also developing courses for Office 2007 and Exchange that should be available by the end of the summer, Porch said.
Other providers include Vigilar Inc.’s Intense School, which is holding a series of five-day Vista-Office 2007 boot camps starting in August. The $2,495 course will prepare students for the Vista configuration exam. Intense School Chief Technology Officer Barry Kaufman said 97% of students in Intense’s MCSE classes pass their exams.
Atlanta-based CED Solutions’ six-day, $2,995 course claims to go one better by preparing students for two MCTS exams on configuring and deploying Vista and Office 2007.
Meanwhile, Houston-based ETEC is, until the end of this month, letting students who register for a 14-day, $5,990 course for Microsoft Certified System Engineering (MCSE) certification also attend a three-day Vista boot camp for free.
Learn IT is offering three-day Vista deployment courses for $1,400 in San Francisco and Santa Clara, Calif. Compared to Training Camp’s courses, Learn IT’s weekday classes run at a relatively light pace — 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. — and the company makes no mention of preparing students for passing certification tests.
Certifications less valuable today
One reason why not all training companies offer certification exam preparation may be because of the recent decrease in the prestige of technical certifications. The dot-com crash left many IT workers, even those with certifications and years of experience, unemployed for many years.
Some scrambled to buttress their resumes by hastily taking courses to add certifications. That led to a situation in which many workers held paper certifications but lacked much or any work experience with a given technology.
Add to that recent reports about the prevalence of cheating and pirating of certification test answers, and it’s no wonder that many employers are less impressed with certifications than they once were. “Certifications used to be the be-all, end-all for getting you a job. Now they’re a way to get you an interview,” Porch said.
Still, certifications are important enough for most students that Training Camp has them taking the exam at the end of its three-day course. Porch said 80% of students pass at the time of the boot camp, and 90% pass after six months.
Moreover, Training Camp takes an approach similar to the one the Princeton Review takes in preparing high school students for the SAT. In addition to teaching the content, Training Camp instructors also teach strategies for taking the mostly multiple-choice test — such as eliminating two answers if they are too similar, or reading the answers first on a long question, Porch said.
Porch says the company has to balance opposing needs. “We don’t want anyone to walk away feeling like they were given the answers to the test,” he said. At the same time, “we try to focus on the exams because it’s 90% of what students are looking for.”
Teaching to the test
While IDC’s Anderson remains a fan of IT boot camps, he takes a hard line against providers focusing purely on getting certified.
“Teaching to the test is, in my view, unethical and bogus,” said Anderson, emphasizing that he was speaking generally and not singling out Training Camp. “What a manager wants is someone who knows the material. They care if you have the skill.”
Anderson doesn’t buy the argument that emphasizing test-taking tactics helps those students who otherwise know the material but tend to choke or underperform during exams.
“We’re talking only about a very small minority of people there,” he said. “It’s not helping the profession of IT to have certificates granted to people who three weeks later may not be able to pass the same test.”
Anderson also warns that some boot camps don’t license official content from Microsoft, leaving them vulnerable to teaching out-of-date information. Potential students need to ask and make sure the courseware didn’t come from “some manual bought at Borders,” he said.
How about an online course instead?
Anderson said students — especially those who are motivated and lack a pressing deadline — should certainly consider other options, such as self-study with books or self-paced online courses. The downside, he pointed out, is that it’s easy to procrastinate with self-guided study programs, since “life tends to get in the way.”
Rubbish, said Tim Hildreth, manager of content solutions at SkillSoft PLC, a Nashua, N.H.-based provider of online IT courses. “If students aren’t motivated to begin with, they won’t be motivated sitting in a classroom, either,” he said.
SkillSoft, which claims 3,000 corporate customers and more than 6 million current end users, offers four Office 2007 courses today. It is also developing an additional eight Vista courses and 50 Office 2007 courses that will start to become available in July.
Hildreth claimed that online courses are more convenient to those who can’t take whole days or weeks off to attend a boot camp. SkillSoft also sells subscriptions to its e-library of more than 12,000 technical books. Those are popular with IT administrators, who can cut-and-paste scripts and programs straight from the books, Hildreth said.
While some SkillSoft courses “are very closely aligned to a certification exam,” Hildreth said, “in general, our courseware tries to be broader than that.”
Another provider, Anaheim, Calif.-based New Horizons, is offering 14 Vista-related courses at the moment.