fast, high quality, inexpensive
I hope the article will be useful to those who are thinking about taking paid, advertised IT courses that promise to touch the keyboard for six months or a year and get you a job.
Briefly about the courses and their manufacturers…
Their motivation is very clear: profit. And the maximum profit can be obtained either from people’s greed or from fear. But making money through fear is not always legal, so marketers of online (and offline) schools have no choice but to make big flashy headlines:
FAST! QUALITATIVELY! CHEAP!
GET A PROFESSION IN 6 MONTHS WITH EMPLOYMENT GUARANTEED!
Now ask yourself a question: does anything in the first phrase confuse you? If not, I have bad news for you: a market economy doesn't work that way.
But in the second phrase, many people who are not familiar with the IT sphere, as a rule, do not confuse anything, although in essence it repeats the first…
Fast
Just six months – and you are a ready-made specialist! They will fight for you in the labor market! But stop…
Would you see a surgeon who completed a 6-month course? It’s unlikely, although yes, it’s different… Okay, how about flying in an airplane controlled by a pilot who has completed a 6-month course? Maybe a lawyer? Teacher?
Most blue-collar professions, such as hairdresser, cook, auto mechanic, can actually be mastered in 6 months, even while skipping classes. But if we are talking about a programmer or an engineer, then no, these specialties require a certain set of fundamental knowledge and skills that cannot be acquired in 6 months of easy pastime hugging the keyboard.
I’ll say for myself: yes, I managed to get into IT after 9 months of studying web development, and I had aces up my sleeve:
I have a higher technical education in information security of telecommunication systems;
I took various (though free) courses every single day until late at night.
Yes, there are people who have been interested in the IT field since childhood, they have a strong base, but… why then do they need courses? All they need is to develop soft skills for better self-presentation. For everyone else, all that remains from the original slogan is hope: FAST! QUALITATIVELY! CHEAP! There are still people with very strong internal motivation, and such people can really gnaw on the granite of computer science for 6 months, day and night, but in this case we must cross out the next point.
Inexpensive
If you are an enthusiast, if you are in a state of “your life is on fire,” if you have a burning desire to learn a new profession, you can do it quickly, but definitely not inexpensively. You have to pay for everything. In the case of paid courses – in money. In the case of internal motivation – personal time, sometimes sleep. Simply sitting in front of a monitor for six months to a year a couple of times a week for an hour, listening to the teacher’s explanations and doing school assignments strictly from start to finish, will give you absolutely nothing. You'll just know that programmers don't just bang on keys. as the author of this article, They also do mental work.
But let's look at the last point of our wonderful commercial proposal.
Qualitatively
With a guarantee of employment, please note! By the way, they write about the guarantee here.
In fact, if you do buy into the marketing offers from paid courses, you have to accept that the most you can get is a tour of the IT field and, perhaps, an understanding of what you are interested in doing next. This is just a good start, and if you are “hooked”, you will study further, but for this you do not have to spend time and money on paid courses, you just sit down and study on the Internet using free resources. And by the way, in this case you pay with the time that will be spent searching for these very free resources.
Let's put it another way: paid courses can only become external motivation (“paid”), but it does not work without internal motivation (“it’s on fire”), and if there is internal motivation, external motivation becomes optional.
There is such a good example about the toilet: if you have an urge, then nothing will stop you. You will not have excuses like “I didn’t have time”, “I was tired”, “it was difficult to get there”, “ugly door”, etc. But imagine that you have a paid ticket to a dirty toilet, but you don’t want to – will you go?
Another thing to think about: all courses offer training and guidance from experts. But why should experts teach you, especially if you are a beginner who doesn’t even know how to use a computer? What will such cooperation give them? Isn’t it better for an expert to train an already experienced specialist with whom some kind of exchange of knowledge and opinions is possible, who does not expect a miracle that he will be led by the hand to a beautiful office with lavender raf? Which ultimately has a payoff? The answer is that a significant part of the course teachers are entry-level or intermediate-level specialists who… will study with you – yes, the Feynman method (I will write about it in future articles). And it’s good if the teacher has a sufficient level of soft skills to explain the material to youwhich I just realized.
And yes, by the way: the material is becoming obsolete. Especially in IT. But this topic is beyond the scope of my publication.
Conclusion
Before you buy into the offer to get an IT profession in 6 months with a job guarantee, ask yourself: are you ready for these 6 months? fuck like a horse work hard, constantly straining your brain? sacrifice free time and sleep? do you really want this, or do you just want a bigger salary? Maybe this is what your parents or spouse want? Are there free courses in the same area and what is stopping you from starting to take them instead of paid ones? If yes, get ready…
I hope that my opus will be useful for someone and will save a couple of tens of thousands of rubles of money, and even better – some amount of wasted time.
Well, to everyone who finished reading, thank you for all your pros (glad you appreciated it) and cons (glad you didn’t pass by)!
