 All right, so I kind of have a love-hate relationship with digital marketing courses. Right, so first of all, there is a huge range of costs for digital marketing courses. You've got courses that are like five bucks on Udemy, all the way up to courses that are over $15,000 if you try to attend some kind of bootcamp. And my business partner, Seth, and I have been helping people to get jobs in a lot of different careers. And of course, digital marketing is one of the best careers you can get into without a college degree and without any experience. So I've talked quite a bit about digital marketing on this channel. I think it's a phenomenal career. But with that being said, there's a lot of courses out there. Most of them are really bad. A few of them are good. And we're gonna be talking about some of the ones that are really bad in this video. And sometimes there's a course that's good if you know what you're getting yourself into. But if you go into it with the wrong expectations, it's gonna be bad. First one on the list I'm gonna talk about is going to be Udemy courses. Now I have a love-hate relationship with Udemy. On one hand, I really like their courses. I've taken a lot of the courses myself. On the other hand, when it comes to the career-related courses, I think they are way too detailed. So this is a big mistake that so many course creators out there make. And if there's somebody out there that is watching this, who is a course creator, you need to pay attention to this. So if your goal is to get somebody a job, the worst thing you can do for them is to try to teach them everything you know. Okay, so for example, if you are a digital marketer with like five, 10 years of experience, you wanna make a course and you wanna teach people what you know so that they can get a job in digital marketing as well. The worst thing you can possibly do is try to teach them everything you know. Now you might be thinking, Shane, what are you talking about? Like, isn't that the whole point of making a course is teaching them everything I know? If you try to teach people everything, they're going to learn nothing. And this is why most courses out there do not get people results. Because the truth is if you are a digital marketer with five, 10 years of experience, think back on that experience and how you actually gain those skills. Did you gain most of those skills by taking some course online or by studying on YouTube? No, you gained most of those skills by doing projects and actually applying the knowledge that you were learning along the way. So you had reference experience and it took you a long amount of time in order to gain those skills. And it's so much easier to learn how to do something when you're actually practicing it. Think about learning a new language or doing math. The way that you get really good at it is to actually practice it, is to actually implement. You just tried to memorize stuff all day long and you never tried to implement it, you wouldn't learn anything. It's the same thing for learning skills with just about any job out there. In almost any job out there, you're going to learn 80% of what you need to know on the job itself by doing projects. As a course creator, if the goal of your course is to get somebody a job, you need to focus on teaching them the 20% that they need to know in order to land that job and ignore everything else. Teach them exactly what they need to know to land the entry-level job and completely ignore all of the other stuff. They'll learn all of that stuff later on while they're working in the job. And if you don't do this, you're just gonna overwhelm them. Even if they do get interviews, they're not gonna know what they're talking about because they tried to learn everything instead of just learning the key things that are important. So this is kind of my big problem with Udemy courses is a lot of them, and this is not such a bad thing as long as you go into it with the right expectation, is a lot of them just teach you information. And you can find information for free on YouTube. You can take free classes all over the internet. Udemy courses are pretty nice because they kind of structure the information so they probably save you some time. But with that being said, most Udemy courses are not going to get you a job. Next one on the list, this is gonna be the first boot camp and that is gonna be Nucleo School. So this is a $5,900 boot camp that takes six months. Now this is a boot camp that's based in Spain, so it's European and it doesn't have the greatest rating. So for instance on careerkarma.com it has 3.9 out of five. So for an almost $6,000 boot camp that takes six months, you would expect better ratings than that. And also a lot of the times people in Europe have other alternatives for getting educated like apprenticeships and then a better college experience that doesn't cost like $80,000 like it does here in the US. So yeah, you know that one's six months for a boot camp. I just don't see how that's worth it. Typically boot camps like this, especially for digital marketing should be maybe three months max. The next one is going to be General Assembly and specifically their boot camp that's around $9,800. They have two different boot camps. One of them is kind of like an online course. The other one is a $9,800 one. That's the one I'm talking about. $9,800, you need to have an abundance of evidence to show that it actually works if you charge that much. And I've talked about this before on my channel but a huge red flag that I see is, you look at their sales page and it has one review and it's from Kiki Tolentino. And she says, getting exposure and time with our instructor and classmates meant we could get to know other industries and how they approach marketing problems. This course gave me the confidence in my decision to move into marketing. So her review doesn't even say that she got a job. It just says, oh, the course gave her confidence and stuff like that. Plus there's no context to the review. So this is a huge red flag in my opinion. Whenever you see these reviews where it's just a picture of somebody's face and then some comment right next to the face, there's no context to it, that is a big red flag. And if you are selling a $9,800 bootcamp, the whole reason people go to bootcamps is to land a job. That is the reason people go. So you need to have proof that your bootcamp actually gets people those results. And that's something, unfortunately, with a lot of these digital marketing bootcamps, and I guess kind of bootcamps in general, you just don't see it very often. And same thing kind of goes with the next one on the list, which is BrainStation, their $15,000 bootcamp. Again, they have like multiple different online courses and bootcamps. I'm talking about the $15,000 one. $15,000, that is a ton of money for a bootcamp that's like three months. If you're gonna charge $15,000, that's what colleges charge for a year sometime. So you need to have a ton of proof that your bootcamp actually gets people results. Now with BrainStation, they do have more proof. So it's a lot better than General Assembly. They have these, what our graduates are saying, and you can read their testimonials, you can read the full testimonials. But still it looks like there's only three total testimonials here. And what you wanna see with a really good testimonial is actually just a video interview. That's the best one you could possibly have because it gives you context. It shows what the person's background was, what their strengths were, what their weaknesses were, where they came from, how long it took. You go over all of those important details, typically in an interview, because it's very easy to fake reviews. And this is how a lot of companies do this. I'm not saying that they did it, but it's very common that companies do this where they'll essentially just ask somebody in an exit survey what they thought about the bootcamp. So for instance, they'll say, what was your favorite part about this bootcamp? What was your least favorite part about this bootcamp? And then they'll take the part where you say, what was your favorite part? And they'll put that as a review. So that, in my opinion, is a little bit of a sketchy way of collecting reviews. Now just to give you an example of an online digital marketing course that does things the right way, there's the Digital Career Blueprint where they have a ton of reviews on their Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And I mean, they have like hundreds, if not thousands of different interviews, reviews, and testimonials. And these are legit full length interviews a lot of the time. There's like hundreds of videos like that. And if they're not like that, at least they have the person's LinkedIn. You can just go look it up. You can even ask them questions if you want to. So that's obviously just much better, right? There's no smoke and mirrors. They're not getting lost in context or anything like that. And if you want to check out the Digital Career Blueprint, I will put a free masterclass down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. Or if you just want to see what all the reviews and testimonials look like, go ahead and click that. And then the other one that I'm seeing, and God, this is a trend that I just despise. I absolutely cannot stand this. And that is universities starting boot camps. Now, some of the universities use their own name with the boot camp. And then some of them are a little tricky about it. They actually use like a well-established boot camp or a name that just sounds like a boot camp and not like a university, but it's actually owned by a university. So this is a trend that I just, I am not liking this trend at all because universities are kind of the ones who sort of caused this problem in the first place in the United States at least. So for instance, universities do a terrible job of teaching digital marketing. If you look up a marketing curriculum, a lot of the time you're only gonna see like two to three classes that have anything to do with digital marketing, even though it's by far the most valuable skill in marketing these days. So the fact that, you know, I'm kind of singling them out, but there's a lot of universities doing this. You know, KSU has a digital marketing boot camp. It's $14,500. And it's called the KSU digital skills boot camp on career department has a ranking of three out of five stars, not surprised by that. And there is 400 hours of material apparently. So this is kind of what I was talking about before where, you know, somebody will just teach somebody everything they possibly could think of instead of just teaching them what they need to know in order to get the job. So yeah, anytime you find out that a boot camp is like owned by a university or something like that, that tends to be a red flag. I mean, maybe it'll change in the future, but universities did not do a good job with a lot of these college degrees when it comes to these skills that change all the time like digital marketing. It's different now than it was five years ago. Universities are terrible with keeping up with those sorts of things. They're basically like an old dinosaur just stuck in the mud when it comes to things that change rapidly like digital marketing. If you are interested in getting into digital marketing, check out some interviews I did. I'll put the interview with a 16 year old who is able to land a job right here and go ahead, gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticism, et cetera that you have on the video. Can't talk, it's late at night and I will see you next time.