Hey everyone,
Lately, I've noticed a curious slowdown in the IT training business, particularly among partners of Cloud giants and also IBM and Cisco. It's got me wondering: what's behind the scenes here?
Are you sensing a similar trend? Any ideas on why this might be happening? Your thoughts and perspectives are appreciated...
How so for Cisco, specifically? I got my CCNA in February.
You’re fine. The CCNA is held to a higher standard than the Net+ regardless.
This. Cisco still has a decent amount of switch sales, I know several orgs that are paying Cisco millions of year just in support contracts just off switches nevermind what they spend in years when they do major hardware refreshes, but their market share in firewalls isn't what it used to be. ASAs used to everywhere. The shift to Firepower is one that many orgs didn't make many having moved to Palo or Fortinet in many cases instead. Some of the orgs I know that moved to Firepower have buyers regret.
Not quite sure what you are saying - do you mean like less of these programs running? If so, it’s because people wisened up and realized most of them are borderline scams and they need to actually feed themselves so they got other jobs.
One reason why the CCNA is so dominant and is the gold standard is because the vastness of the exam. It doesn't teach you Cisco necessarily. It teaches you actual practical networking with an emphasis on Cisco. Which other exams do the opposite. They teach you the vendor first then the fundamentals.
Another thing is after you start to use other vendors like arista, hpe, dell, ruckus, you start to notice something....their syntax is based in Cisco iOS.
So once you know Cisco, you are able to transition to other vendors.
Basically, learning Cisco is going to be your best use of time if you want to become as vendor neutral as possible, believe it or not.
And finally, large companies tend to use Cisco too. I feel like Cisco is a lot like VMware. While you see a lot of companies moving from VMware to proxmox, VMware is not targeting the small companies anymore. They realized they don't make money supporting these small companies, and the big money is the large multi million dollar contracts, so they price them out .
In turn, the training for Cisco is turning more to corporate training and not public.
I wish I would’ve read this before trying to get the CompTia Net+ twice. I should be focusing more on the CCNA
The ccna covers pretty much everything that is on net+ plus all the Cisco stuff plus some more networking stuff not on net+. I killed the net+ and I’m not ready for ccna because of the Cisco CLI stuff.
Gotcha. Next time when I take the Net+ I’m going to ask for accommodations because it helps me to read the questions out loud..they wouldn’t allow it last time I took the test
It's my understanding far too many places see training as a waste of time, money, and resources. You can upskill and cert, get a degree. If you lack any experience you might as well be invisible.
There's also a glut of "Will my A+ get me into CyberSecurity" people that saturated the market.
So to compensate, they inflate job postings hoping for a unicorn (or senior) will accept a position for lesser pay and benefits. Don't think it's much gatekeeping, which is still a thing in some areas mind you.
Thought I was going crazy why this same question kept coming up everytime I opened Reddit. Now I realized you posted it in like 10 different subs
Companies are going with crummy subscription programs with strong marketing teams like Pluralsight.
My company switched to Pluralsight, I hate it.
Before we had Global Knowledge with instructors and you put your OOO message up and only focused on the class for the days you were taking the classes. Now with Pluralsight, the video is on one of my 20 + browser tabs minimized while I'm dealing with Cloud/Infrastructure issues/tickets.
With Pluralsight it is literally noise in the background.
If companies actually cared about training they wouldn't use Pluralsight or other platforms of similar ilk.
Pluralsight is quantity of content over quality. They advertise a giant library, but it is full of filler talking and repetition, and not very good at clearly communicating the subject matter. It also has bad transcription software and no labs.
I run into more and more management teams who have convinced themselves that it will be more efficient to replace employees or outsource positions versus investing any time or money into training. Very rarely does it ever work out the way they think it will. Especially in situations where management thinks it's all part of a "move fast and break things" approach.
We've never seen much utility or value in that approach. We pay for training and continuing education and encourage specialization. We see the value in preserving institutional knowledge and professional relationships. We regularly have clients who balk at our resistance to outsource or rely on contractors, but at the end of the day we have a cohesive, capable team who communicates and supports one another and consistently delivers awesome stuff.
They move fast and build things. Together. Which I very much prefer.
A possibility is that courses are ridiculously expensive and recently there was a surge in video on deman options that were pretty reasonable. Also cloud providers have been doing their own training which has moved a lot of propriety vendors into the cloud.
This is why I am kind of hesitant to study the CCNA. I wish there was another vendor neutral cert with as much weight.
I have a few VMs setup, but I haven't done a lot with them beyond initial setup. I think I am more or less wasting my time, until I get my 1st real IT job though.
Home labs using VMs:
Kali Linux: Playing with pentesting, Mostly OSINT for internship
2022 Server: ADDS and DNS, MySQL server, ServiceNow, Splunk
2022 Server: Exchange. I can send mail across my domain, but I can't get mail outside. I think it's because my ISP uses CGNAT.
Win11: Client. Running mysql workstation to refresh my SQL skills.
GNS3: Setup Networks. Haven't messed with this much yet, but I have the VM loaded. I need to find some labs to play with.
Linux Mint: Was planning to set this up as a client and just to play with Linux a bit.
Office365Admin: I have setup an account, but i haven't played with this yet.
SCCM: The install process seemed complicated, so I have been holding off on setting this up.
You can’t really go wrong either nabbing a CCNA tbh
Cloud burst. Too many were trained on cloud, not enough jobs for all of them
The story is go back to school
The rise of third-party options, I’d say. It fills my spam folder daily
Cisco is literally right now in the middle of their Oracle REACH: Summer Engagement Program
Everyone is switching to support GenAI. I think GenAI is great. But it's overhyped. There are a lot of other areas in IT that can become as impactful and useful as GenAI. But I'm a big believer in ML predictive models.
Why would you bother with certs when there's so much future uncertainty in this industry?
You could have a million certs and be unemployed if 5 years down the line an indian using AI does the job for pennies.
Maybe IBM and Cisco are declining lol