http://www.ComputerBob.com/guides/guide_training.php .
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by ComputerBob
September 18, 1999
Every few months, the computer industry embraces some new certification exam designed to separate those who "know their stuff" from those who don't. As a result, many corporate and educational training centers have sprung up, offering certification training programs to prepare people to take certification exams. For anyone who is considering taking computer certification training, here are some questions to ask any prospective training center before agreeing to pay them hundreds, or even thousands of dollars for certification training.
If you don't have the prerequisite knowledge and experience to take the course, don't take it. If you do, you're going to feel lost and confused through the entire course; you're going to slow the whole class down, making it difficult or impossible for the instructor to cover all of the course's required topics; and you ultimately won't learn much of what the course is supposed to teach.
Some training centers have met certain standards to be certified by a certification governing body and/or endorsed by the company that manufactures the hardware or software that is being taught. Other training centers' programs are not certified or endorsed by anyone.
If the training program is certified, they probably use textbooks, course materials, software and curriculum that are authorized by the company that manufactures the hardware or software that is being taught.
Find out if the price of the course includes one or more textbooks, CD-ROMs, practice tests, handouts, etc. You don't want to find out during the first class meeting that the required textbook, course materials, and software are going to cost you an additional couple of hundred dollars.
Usually, the smaller the class size, the more individual attention you'll be able to get from the instructor. If they allow more than 15 or 20 students into the course, you probably won't get much individual attention from the instructor.
You know your own schedule -- make sure that you're going to have enough time to do the required homework.
As unbelievable as it sounds, some certification programs don't require certification training instructors to hold the certifications that they're supposed to be training other people to get.
It's probably better not to take certification training from someone who was a student in last month's training class.
It is possible for a person to read books, take training courses, pass a certification exam, and become a certification training instructor without ever having any experience working in the computer industry. Unfortunately, people who go that route rarely make good instructors, because they have no real-world computer experience to draw from.
Students vary widely in aptitude, ability, and motivation, and no training center can claim that 100% of its students pass the exam on their first try. But a good certification training center will know how many of their students do, and will also be able to tell you how the center's success rates compare to the success rate of other instructors and other training centers. In contrast, a bad training center will refuse to be accountable for their success rates -- they either won't know or they won't tell you how many of their students have passed the exam on the first attempt, and they may even try to convince you that the exam is so hard that no one can possibly pass it on their first attempt. That's just their way of saying "We can't promise that we'll teach you anything."
Some training courses are designed to teach you everything you'll need to know to pass a certification exam. Other training courses are only designed to give you a quick overview of the topics that are covered by the exam, so that you'll know what material to study on your own for several more weeks or months before you take the exam.
Some training centers give certificates to the students who complete their training, allowing those students to take the certification exam at a discounted price.
Every certification training course involves learning many specific, diverse, and often highly technical activities and topics, in a logical order, in a very short period of time. Every good certification training instructor has a very clear plan for accomplishing that goal. Therefore, a certification training instructor who "shoots from the hip" or who claims to "adapt the instruction to meet the needs of the particular students" is an inefficient and ineffective training instructor. Bottom line: If two students take the same training course from the same instructor at different times, both students should receive exactly the same training, even if one of them is in a class full of normal students and the other is in a class full of computer geniuses.
There are no guarantees here, but more experience is usually better than less experience. Unfortunately, a bad instructor who has been teaching for 10 years is still a bad instructor.
It's hard enough to understand some computer topics without the added burden of having to switch between two or more instructors.
You might be surprised to know how many instructors end each of their training sessions 30 minutes sooner than the scheduled end of the session. In just one training course, that practice could cheat students out of several hours of training time.
Make sure you can get your money back if either the course or the instructor
don't meet your expectations. If you need to ask for a refund, do it right
away, and be prepared to give specific details of why you were unhappy
with the course.