 is the Meta certificate program actually worth it? That is gonna be the topic of today's video and we're gonna be talking about how long it takes to complete the certificate, the cost, the demand, the salary, production value of the course, the course's chances of lending you a job, the value of the certificate overall, the pros and cons of the cert, and at the end I'm gonna go over whether or not I think the certificate is worth it. Now, Meta has several other professional certificates that they've offered before, but the ones I'm gonna be talking about right now because they're super hot and they just dropped are gonna be the front-end developer and back-end developer certificates. So I'm gonna be basically answering any question that you have on these certs and if I don't answer one of your questions, go ahead, comment down below. I'm sure myself or somebody else in the community will be able to answer the question. And if you have any experience with the certs yourself, go ahead and comment them down below as well. And if you enjoy videos like this, go ahead and let me know by gently annihilating the like button and let's try to get to 3,000 likes on this video. So without further ado, let's jump right into it by answering the question, what exactly is the Meta Professional Certificate Program? And second, why is everybody talking about it right now? So like I've mentioned before, Meta previously known as Facebook had released a few certificates before, but they recently released two software development related courses. One of them is on front-end development and the other one is on back-end development. And these are introductory courses that are designed to get you a job and is little as seven months. Now, their biggest competitor, Google, has not released any comprehensive courses on software development. And Google is Meta's biggest competitor. So Meta stepped up to the plate to provide this option and challenge Google as well. So there really is three main reasons to take these certificates. One is to get your first entry-level job. Two would be to either get a raise or switch into a position that has a little bit more software development. And then three would be to transition into a completely new career. Now, the front-end course has nine different modules which I'll read off to you really quickly. Introduction to front-end development is the first module, then programming with JavaScript, then version control, HTML and CSS in depth, react basics, advanced react, principles of UI and UX design, front-end developer capstone, and then coding interview preparation. Then the back-end course has 10 modules. Introduction to back-end development, programming in Python, version control, databases, Django web framework, APIs, the full stack, cloud computing, back-end developer capstone, and coding interview preparation. So before I get into whether the Meta certificate is worth it, I want to briefly talk about the video I did last year where I talked about whether or not the Google certificate programs were worth it. Now, at the time, the Google certificate programs were relatively new and unknown, kind of like the Meta programs are now. And to be honest, the jury wasn't in on them yet as to whether they were worth it or not. So in theory, I did love the idea of certificates because college degrees in many cases teach people outdated information and they're unnecessary for many careers. So these big, well-respected companies like Google started coming out with certificates that covered high-demand jobs. And the reason for that is because they couldn't find people that had the skills to fill these jobs themselves. And college simply was not preparing people for these careers. Now, imagine how frustrated these companies must have been to go through the trouble to basically create their own college curriculum to teach people the skills that college wasn't teaching them. However, since then, I've recommended these to a bunch of different people. I've gotten a lot of feedback and it's gone from a theory or a hypothesis to something that I routinely recommend to people depending on the career path they're trying to go down. I was extremely skeptical about their claims last year when I did that video, but at the end of the video, I still gave it a thumbs up overall. Now, here are a few comments from that video from people who actually took these certificates. Here's a guy who landed a six-figure job after taking the Google Data Analytics certificate in two months. Here's a guy who took the IT certificate in one month and was able to land a job from it. Here's another guy who was in the process of taking the IT certificate and was already getting messages from recruiters. And here's another guy who took a certificate and got a job within a few months. So yeah, I think you get the idea. A lot of the time, these certificates right now are basically like a cheat code and who knows how long it's gonna last. And the best time to get these certificates before they become saturated is right now, right when they get released. Because these companies are extremely competitive with each other. They're constantly trying to scalp talent. For instance, Facebook has been on a rampage the last few years, stealing talent from other fang or manga companies. Now, on the front end professional certificate itself, it says, launch your career as a front end developer, build job ready skills for an in-demand career and earn a credential from meta. No degree or prior experience required to get started. It's also a shareable certificate and it's 100% online. So you can do it from anywhere you want as long as you have an internet connection. And on top of that, you can do it at your own pace. And they say right here that it's a beginner level certificate. And by the way, there are actually ways of looking this up on LinkedIn so that recruiters and hiring managers can find you based on these certificates that you've taken. So even if you aren't done with the certificate already, if you just started taking it, make sure to put that on your LinkedIn because people can actually start looking you up before you've even finished the certificate. And if you wanna follow along with me, by the way, I am gonna provide links to both of the certificates. I'll put them down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. I am an affiliate for Coursera, so if you click the links, I might get a small commission from that. But to be honest with you, it's not all that much and I would recommend Coursera whether or not I was an affiliate for them. I recommended them last year without being an affiliate at all, for instance. So how long does it take to complete these certificates? Well, for front end, it says approximately seven months and for back end, it says approximately eight months. Now, everybody knows it's easier to get a job as a front end developer than a back end developer. That's common knowledge. But at the same time, there's a lot more people trying to land jobs in front end than there is in back end. So it could give you a small advantage if you're somebody who prefers more of a back end developer type role. Now, based off of the amount of time my students were reporting to me that it took them to get through the Google certs. You know, it says on there that it takes six months to get through the Google IT certification, but many students were telling me it takes anywhere from like a couple of weeks to two months at most. For the data analytics cert, it said six months. Most of the students were getting through it in two to three months. Now, with that being said, this isn't an IT cert and no offense to my IT peeps out there, but, you know, software development is gonna be harder than that. For instance, I monitor different types of boot camps out there and IT boot camps or digital marketing boot camps tend to get people jobs a lot faster than software developer boot camps do. So for instance, here's a boot camp website. They say it takes about seven months to get a job in digital marketing and 10 months for full stack web development. Here's another boot camp. They say it takes about 14 weeks to get a job in IT support, which is about four and a half months. Whereas for Java development, it takes about nine months to get a job. So based on my past experience, I'm gonna guesstimate these certificates are gonna take somewhere between three to five months for you to complete. And the front end developer certificate will probably be easier and it won't take you as long. But even if it takes you five months for the cost, which we're gonna go over in a bit, the cost is extremely low, it's gonna be a much better deal than going to something like a coding boot camp, which oftentimes can take 18 months to get a job and they're gonna charge you like 10 to $15,000. Now with that being said, one thing that's also great about this is it might save you a lot of time because you take the certificate and you realize you don't want to be a software developer. That is great. If you take this cert in halfway through it, you realize you don't wanna be a software developer. Congratulations, you just saved yourself four to five years of time because a lot of people go to college, get their degree, get one year into their career or maybe they try to get a career and they can't get a job and they decide that it's not for them or a lot of people will go to college and halfway through their degree, they decide they don't wanna go into the career either. So a lot of them will waste 5.1 years on average and $80,000 because that's how long and how much it takes to get a bachelor's degree on average. This is fine. I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently. Now the great thing about these certificates is they're gonna teach you exactly what you need to know for the job because they're designed by companies who hire people for these positions. So if you take this certificate and halfway through, you realize it's not for you, that is awesome. It probably only costed you like maybe $50 to $100 and a few months of your life rather than $80,000 in debt and five years. So in terms of the time it takes and how much time and opportunity cost it saves you, this is a phenomenal option. And this is what, in my opinion, really sets online courses and certificates apart from the competition. It's a really cost effective and time effective way to figure out what you wanna do with your life. Speaking of the cost, let's talk about that next. Now I've gone over on this channel how much a college degree typically costs. It's gonna be 80K, people go $40,000 in debt on average and it takes 5.1 years. So it's extremely costly both to your wallet as well as your time. Then boot camps came along and they were a pretty good alternative to college. And I've worked with a lot of students who have gone to boot camps. Sometimes that's the best option for people. I recently worked with an international student who immigrated from Brazil. College wasn't an option for him so we figured out a way to get him a job with a boot camp and he was able to land a job within six months as a software developer. With that being said, a lot of boot camps take something like 18 months to get people jobs and they can cost 10 to $15,000. So they're very expensive. And they can be even more expensive if you sign an ISA or income share agreement. Coursera on the other hand for the professional certificates costs 39.99 per month. So let's say it takes you five months because I estimated this would take three to five months. So that's pretty good. Can't really beat the value there. Next we're gonna be talking about the demand. So for the software developer certificates you can see that it is a career where there is a ton of demand if you go into it. For instance, on VLS software developers have a 22% expected job outlook over the next 10 years which is much faster than average. And that's with 1.8 million jobs right now in the US. Technology occupations in general are growing 13% over the next 10 years which is one of the fastest out of all different types of occupations. And if you type in software development at the entry level on LinkedIn you're gonna see 429,000 results. And if you look up the Zip Recruiter Skills Index which basically tries to value different types of skills you're gonna see software engineering as number one and software development related skills are basically all over the top 20. They're like 15 out of the top 20 or something like that. And on my personal college degree ranker that I created computer science is the number one degree that you can get because there is so much demand for it at about 154 demand score. So yeah, ridiculous amount of demand here probably the most in-demand skill that you can possibly learn. However, it is not the easiest skill to learn. There are many careers out there where you can learn the skills needed for the career much faster than software development. Like you can't just say I'm a software developer snap your fingers and you got a job. Might have been true 10 years ago but now companies have gotten wise and they can tell if you're just BSing. So you really do have to know your stuff when it comes to software development if you want to land that first entry level job. But yeah, the demand is just phenomenal here. I mean it does not get any better than software development. Next we're gonna be talking about salary. So software developers make about $110,000 a year according to BLS and technology occupations in general pay on average $97,000 a year which is the highest by far out of all different types of occupations. And over a lifetime AKA over the last 40 years computer and math related occupations pay the second most behind engineering. And I wouldn't be surprised if over the next 40 years they surpass engineering and they become number one. Now one subreddit that I love to follow is the fire subreddit. That stands for financial independence retire early. And if you follow this subreddit for any amount of time you're gonna notice that most of the people in the subreddit are in the technology industry and many of them are software developers or coders. And this speaks volumes because a lot of the people who are trying to retire by the time they're 30, 35, 40 et cetera are working in tech and a lot of them are working in software development. So to even think that you can retire early you have to be making really, really good money. So this is an extremely profitable skill. I would say as an employee this might be the most profitable skill on average. There's some other ones that are pretty profitable but they're very incentive based or they're entrepreneurial. So for instance like sales jobs you can make more money but it's extremely incentive based. So you have to sell like a million dollars a year or something if you wanna make 200, 300,000. So yeah, when it comes to salary software development is absolutely amazing. Next we're gonna be talking about the production value of the course. Now this is gonna be the hardest one for me to speak on because the course is brand new but I have taken tons and tons of courses in my life. I've taken really good ones that were phenomenal and I've taken ones that were terrible but this course was actually taught by meta staff. So these are people who were on the front lines probably got hired in the last few years and they're people who likely help with the hiring and training process of entry level employees. So this isn't like a bootcamp who is made by somebody who got a software developer job like 10 years ago. It's also not made by a professor who used to work as a computer scientist like 20 or 30 years ago. And that's important because these types of skills rapidly change. There are languages that were really popular five years ago that are no longer as popular and there's also languages that didn't even exist five years ago that are becoming extremely popular. Now there's not that many ratings yet only about 52 but the back end professional developer certificate for instance has a 4.8 star rating so that's fantastic. And if you look at one of the first modules the programming with JavaScript module that has a five star rating so perfect. And if you look at one of the courses that came out earlier that a lot of people have gone through about 9,900 people have rated the Meta social media marketing professional certificate at 4.9 stars overall. So it looks like they did a phenomenal job with that and chances are they did a really good job with this so it's gonna get that high rating as time goes on. Now I'm not gonna go over all the technical skills you can learn you can check all that stuff out but I'll briefly just kind of flash it on the screen. So this is the front end web developer stuff that you're gonna learn and here's the skills that you're gonna gain. I really do like that they're teaching react that's one that I've seen help a lot of people get jobs. Here's the back end developer stuff what you'll learn and the skills that you'll gain and just overall professional certificates typically have very good production value and they're relatively engaging and educational. Next I'm gonna be talking about your chances of landing a job and this is probably the most important part. So I've seen a ton of courses out there on like Udemy or like private courses on Teachable that teach people skills and that's great don't get me wrong I think it's awesome that they teach people skills but they totally leave out the whole getting a job thing which is incredibly important and one of the most important things you can do in order to get a job is to do projects and build your portfolio. So I love that meta actually focused on this so you can see here there's an applied learning project. So they're actually gonna have you complete nine different projects in the front end developer course for instance and these are projects that you can showcase to prove that you actually have the skills that you're saying that you have are a very particular set of skills skills I've acquired of her. Meta professional certificate program. So by the end of the program you're basically gonna have an entire portfolio and on top of helping you build a portfolio they're also gonna help you with the coding interviews plus and this might be the most valuable thing of all you're gonna get access to an exclusive job board not only will it make it more likely that you get hired at Facebook but there's 200 plus different companies that have agreed to recognize the meta certificates and they agreed to source talent through these certificates. So these certs are actually highly respected by recruiters hiring managers and business owners and a lot of the time people actually search LinkedIn using the certs. Like I mentioned that guy in the comment section who actually put on his LinkedIn that he was in the process of taking that certification and recruiters were already starting to reach out to him. He didn't even have to reach out to them. So this gives you many chances of being discovered as a talent. Now these certs are new, there's not as much statistics but the Google IT certs about 42% of people said it helped them make more money 37% of people said it helped them get a job and 94% of people said they'd recommend it to a family member or a friend. Now you might think 37% is low but you have to realize that a lot of people probably just took the certificate to brush up on their skills. So many people weren't taking these certificates in order to get a job, they already had one. So these are actually phenomenal numbers especially for something that costs so little and doesn't take that much of your time. So in my opinion these certs are definitely going to help you get a job. Now let's talk about the overall value of the certificate. When you're talking about overall value I like to think of things in terms of risk and reward. So what are you risking and what is the possible reward and what are your chances of getting that reward? So in this case you're risking maximum like $200 and three to five months of your life. The possible reward for this is learning an in-demand skill set and getting a job that will basically mean that you are financially set for life. Now when you compare this to the risk reward of college college costs around $80,000 and it takes 5.1 years of your life or the risk reward of boot camps which costs 10 to $15,000 and takes somewhere between six to 18 months of your life. So it's kind of a no-brainer and I'm not saying those other options aren't good as well for certain careers those other options can be viable and let's be honest comparing these things it's really an apples to oranges comparison but the true value I see for certificates is two things. One, it's a very cheap way for you to figure out if that's a good career for you and two, it's a way of being discovered. Very easy to find people who have these brand name certificates from companies like Meta or Google. And another great thing about these certificates is the companies tend to only make them for career pass that are in very high demand and the reason for that is because again, like I said, they were frustrated with colleges and they weren't finding people who had the skills they wanted. So if you take these entry level certs and you find that you enjoy the work, congrats, you might've just found yourself a job for life. So the value here overall is incredible. Now let's quickly talk about the pros and cons of the certifications. So the pros here, affordable, fast, not much risk, brand recognition value, gives you access to more job opportunities and you can learn from anywhere. The cons here, it's new so it's relatively unknown not a lot of reports on them. Certificates aren't very social. They're also not that interactive. So you kind of have to be somewhat self-directed. You know, if you decide not to work, nobody is gonna stop you from doing that. And you're also not guaranteed a job, but let's be honest, college and bootcamps don't guarantee you a job either. So overall, is the certificate worth it or not? So when I reviewed the Google certificate program last year, I gave it one thumbs up. And like I said before, that's because it was still relatively new and unknown. Now that I have more references and I've worked with a lot of people who've gone through these programs, I give this two major thumbs up. It is a phenomenal option for a bunch of people out there. I highly, highly recommend them and they're especially good for somebody who's new and they wanna dip their toe in different careers and see what's best for them. And you wanna be able to do this without risking all that much effort, time or money. If you enjoyed this video, go ahead, check out my other video right here. I made it just for you. Go ahead, gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera. Good job on the video and I will see you next time.