 All right guys, so this is a topic that I've stayed away from for a very long time. Boot camps in general and specifically I'm going to be talking about digital marketing boot camps today. So why have I stayed away from this topic? Well the reason is because there's a lot of boot camps out there, some of them are really good and some of them are really bad. And then there's been a lot of controversies where a boot camp will start off really good and then a year or two down the line after they've got a bunch of good press and they have a good reputation, then they'll start kind of not delivering their students result. But with that being said, boot camps are a big part of alternative education. They are an alternative to college in many cases. So I'm going to be covering this topic and specifically we're going to be talking about the best digital marketing boot camps. We're going to be ranking them from S tier, which is the best all the way to F tier, which is the worst. So let's go ahead and do it. Let's jump right into it with the first one on the list, which is going to be simply learn. Now, if you look at simplylearn.com, career karma ranks 4.4 out of 5 and that's with 1200 ratings. If you look at coursereport.com, simply learn ranks 4.49 out of 5 and that's with over 700 ratings. And then if you look at trustpilot.com, simply learn ranks 4.5 out of 5 and that's with over 21,500 ratings. First of all, career karma and course report are online sites that are dedicated to ranking boot camps, whereas trust pilots a little different. It just kind of ranks the company in general. But with that being said, if you look into a lot of the trust pilot rankings, they have nothing to do with the boot camp itself. So someone might have bought a really cheap course for less than $100, had a good experience with it and then they go on these sites and leave a ranking and then other people that see it think that they're leaving the ranking for the boot camp. But with that being said, when you look at the reviews, one of the ones they talk about is the postgraduate program in digital marketing. And it looks like a pretty good program overall and if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you're going to see that the total admission fees for this program is about $2,139. But the problem is this is not the only boot camp or online course on simply learn. There's a bunch of different ones. This is one that got one of the better ratings though. Some of the digital marketing courses are like $8,000, some of them are around 1,000. So it's less of a boot camp and more of an online course, but it is an interactive online course and I mean, let's be honest, what's the difference between an online boot camp and an online course that's interactive? Basically nothing. So yeah, overall the reviews are relatively good. The only problem is it's way too scattered. There's way too many online programs that they offer so it's hard to tell which one is the best. But with that being said, I'm going to go ahead and put this one into A tier. All right, so next one on the list is going to be Thinkful. So Thinkful does an online digital marketing boot camp. They claim that it takes about three months and then you're going to have job ready skills. And it costs about $4,900. They have a financing option where you pay about $2,066 for three months if you can't pay the $4,900 upfront. Now overall, Thinkful is 4.8 out of five stars on career karma with over 800 ratings, so that's really good. On course report, it's 4.55 with over 900 ratings, so that's also good. But on trust pilot, they only have about five ratings and it's a 2.7 out of five, so that's a little bit of a red flag. But you can't really say too much if there's only five ratings. One thing that is a little bit of a red flag to me is whenever I see reviews, testimonials, that sort of thing, and it's just a picture of a person's face with a quote. For instance, this testimonial from Allison Short says she's a Thinkful grad. Just a picture of her face and it's a quote. It says, in two months, I had two offers and a third one on the way. I think we all want to do satisfying work but also have a life. This job enables me to have a balanced life. The problem with these types of quotes is there's no context, right? You don't know what kind of question they asked her in order to get that quote. This could have just been like an exit survey, one sort of thing, like what was your favorite part about taking this boot camp, and then the next question was what was your least favorite part, but then of course they put the part that's their favorite part. It could be that the company has partner companies that they may or may not recommend people to, and if you don't give them a good rating, they're not going to recommend you to the partner company. So you might feel a lot of pressure to give them a good review at that time. So whenever I see these little like floating head type reviews where it's just a quote, it's not the person actually saying it themselves, or it's not the person like posting it on their LinkedIn or something along those lines, that is a bit of a red flag. So the best reviews are always going to be interviews where you just ask them questions and they talk about their experience. Another type of review that's really good is if someone posts on LinkedIn or Facebook or something like that, but really LinkedIn is better because you can actually just go on there and ask them yourself what they thought of the program. And then the fact that it looks like they only have one student review on here is kind of pathetic. I mean, listen, if you put a thousand people through a digital marketing program, even if it's the worst program in the world, a few of them are probably going to end up getting jobs, right? They would have gotten jobs anyways on their own. So the fact that they only have one student review on here is really just not impressive at all. And this is something I see with a lot of digital marketing boot camps for some reason. But with that being said, the price point, you know, 4,900, that's actually really reasonable compared to a lot of the other boot camps. And they did have relatively good ratings on a lot of those websites. So for that reason, I'm going to go ahead and put Thinkful into B tier. Next, we're going to be talking about another very popular boot camp for digital marketing, which is General Assembly. All right, so General Assembly has two different courses. One of them is their online digital marketing course that they say it's kind of like beginner friendly. And the other one is a digital marketing immersive. So the online digital marketing course is a lot cheaper, it's like 3,900 something dollars. I think it's 3,950. And then the digital marketing immersive is a little less than $10,000. I think it came out to be about $9,800 overall. And that's when you convert from Australian dollars to USD. So this is obviously very confusing as well because whenever they do the rankings on these different websites like coursereport.com, careerkarma.com, they just basically push all the boot camps together, right? Even boot camps that have nothing to do with digital marketing. So for instance, let's say General Assembly or these other boot camps, they have like a software development boot camp and a tech sales boot camp and this boot camp and that boot camp. They just put all of the rankings together. So they might have one really good boot camp and then all the other ones are really bad and they have a low ranking. But you never really know unless you look more deeply into it. So I really think you should read the individual reports from people and make sure you know what you're getting yourself into with all of these. I did spend some time doing that. And with that being said, when it comes to General Assembly, it wasn't the worst, but it also wasn't the best. So careerkarma has them about 4.5 out of five stars. Coursereport has them at 4.31 out of five stars and there's 400 ratings and 500 ratings. Trustpilot has them at 2.9 out of five stars. And then like I said before, the two courses, one of them's about $4,000, the other one's almost 10,000. You know, and what do you know when you look at the actual testimonials? This one's from Kiki, Tolentino, getting exposure and time with our instructors 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 it doesn't even say anything about getting her a marketing job or anything like that. I mean, there's plenty of courses online that will teach you how to do digital marketing. I mean, realistically, you can learn it all for free on YouTube and other sources. Like the whole point of going to a bootcamp is to get you a job, right? That's why they're so much more expensive than courses like Udemy, for instance. So the fact that she's not even saying anything about getting a job is a huge red flag. Plus, it's just a picture of her and it's a quote from her, which again, we don't know the context of the quote. So it just amazes me that these bootcamps have the audacity to charge $4,000 and not even have testimonials and reviews. Come on, you're lying. I said give it to me. Or have very few testimonials and reviews. If you're gonna be charging $4,000, you need to have overwhelming evidence that your product works. So yeah, general assembly, I'm gonna put this one into C tier. Next one on the list is going to be BrainStation. All right, so BrainStation claims to have a proven system, 90 plus percent hiring rate within 180 days of graduating, thousands of graduates from around the world. Now, whenever I see this from bootcamps, this 90 plus percent hiring rate within 180 days of graduating, I really have to question it, right? Because what do you mean by hiring rate? Do you mean they got digital marketing jobs? Do you mean they were employed? Were they employed at some point by someone within 180 days of graduating? What the heck does that even mean? A hiring rate, 90 plus percent hiring rate. So I really like it when bootcamps elaborate on that and it looks like they don't do that. Now it does look like they have more testimonials than some of the other bootcamps, which is good. They're still floating head testimonials, but they do have a link where you can read the full testimonial to get context, which is very important. So I got to give them props there. But with that being said, where is the price? Where's the price? So basically it says, view the program package two, which isn't even proper English. And essentially what it looks like is you have to give them all of your information in order to figure out what the price is. Now, I looked into it and that's a massive red flag. They're not revealing the price. That means that the price is probably very expensive. But I looked into it and BrainStation has several different online courses in bootcamps, kind of similar to SimplyLearn. But it ranges from $950 to $15,000 for a bootcamp. So that's the most expensive bootcamp on this entire video, right? So are they getting people results? I wouldn't doubt it. It looks like it's about two and a half months or so. They do have a decent amount of testimonials, but with that being said, is it worth $15,000? That's hard to justify. So I'm gonna go ahead and put BrainStation into C tier. Next on the list is Jelly Academy. I'm not gonna spend too much time on this because it's a relatively unknown one. It's also Canadian based, so it's really only available to Canadians. But yeah, it turned out to be pretty good. It's $4,000, had a 4.9 rating on Career Karma, 5.0 rating on Course Report. Not that many ratings, only about 10 ratings each. But yeah, it's $4,000 and it's a month and a half. Didn't have all that many testimonials, but overall, what I found from searching on the internet was relatively good, so I'll put Jelly Academy into B tier. The next one is gonna be Nucleo School. This one is European based, so they're actually from Spain. The ratings here, 3.9 out of five on Career Karma, 4.52 on Course Report. It's also about $5,900 and it takes six months. So wasn't too impressed with Nucleo School overall. Not very many ratings. It's also European based, so you kinda have to be from there. So I'm gonna go ahead and put Nucleo School into C tier. Next one is going to be the Digital Career Blueprint. Now, this one isn't technically a bootcamp, right? It's not like an online bootcamp or anything like that, but it is an interactive course. And let's be honest, what is the difference between an online bootcamp and an interactive course that says that they're going to teach you how to get a job? Pretty much nothing, those are essentially the same thing. Now if you look up Digital Career Blueprint on TrustPilot, it has all five star ratings. Now with the way TrustPilot does their rankings, it doesn't have as many, so it gives it a 4.7 out of five, which is still really good, even though it has all five star ratings, you have to have like a ton of them in order to get five stars overall. Now what sets the Digital Career Blueprint apart from all of the others on this list is the fact that it has literally thousands of interviews, testimonials, and reviews. Seriously, the guy who started this course, his name is Seth Jared, and between his YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, he posts basically like success stories almost every day. It's just endless amounts of proof that he actually gets his students jobs. And these aren't just any testimonials. These are typically testimonials where he's either asking them questions, so it's basically like an interview, so you get context, you understand kind of like where they were coming from. You know, they didn't already have a digital marketing job and they're talking about how much they learned from the course or anything like that. And then the cool thing about the interviews is you can just look these people up on LinkedIn. Their name is in the description. Sometimes their LinkedIn is there as well. Or if they don't do an interview, these are testimonials where it's on their LinkedIn, typically, so you can just look them up on there and you can literally ask them if they thought the course was real, if it was legit. So this is how testimonials are supposed to be. This is how you're supposed to prove that your product actually works. And I can confidently say that after doing this research, I believe there is more proof that the digital career blueprint gets people jobs than all of the other ones on this list combined. Now it also has a 30 day money back guarantee. It's self-paced and typically it takes people maybe around two to three months or so to get through the course. And the course itself costs about $800 at this time. He's probably gonna be raising the price pretty soon because it's just very obvious that it's the best option and it's much cheaper than all of the other options. I mean, the next cheapest option on here is like $3,950 for boot camps, right? So he's clearly getting the best results and he has probably the best and cheapest product. He also offers a free digital marketing masterclass if you're interested in what digital marketing is, the different routes you can go, which routes he thinks are best, as well as if it's a good fit for your personality. So I will link that down in the description and maybe the pen comment down below as well. This one is going into S tier. Next one on the list is going to be the KSU Digital Skills Boot Camp. So this is obviously a boot camp from a university, KSU. Now that is a little bit of a problem, as you can imagine, since universities were the ones who caused the entire problem with getting educated in the first place. So am I gonna trust a university to educate me with a digital marketing boot camp when their marketing curriculum only has one or two digital marketing classes in it? Probably not. And if you look up the rankings, it's like three out of five on career karma. And to be honest with you, there's a bunch of these digital marketing boot camps that universities are doing and almost all of them get terrible, terrible results. And it doesn't surprise me at all. Universities, the way they are structured, they cannot keep up with modern trends. They simply cannot do it. They're like an old monolithic dinosaur that is stuck in the mud. Universities are still good for teaching certain subjects, but when it comes to modern trends, things that change every few years like digital marketing, they are terrible. And I mean terrible at teaching these types of subjects. And on top of that, this boot camp was $14,500. I don't know what to say. This one, obviously it's gonna go into F tier, absolutely under no circumstances should you go to a boot camp that is hosted by a university. Next on the list is going to be Sparka Academy. Now I wanted to mention this one. It's based in Hong Kong. So for my few viewers out there from Hong Kong, it got a 4.5 out of five star rating. It seemed pretty decent. I just wanted to mention that for people who are in that area. I put this one into D tier, it was okay. It wasn't great. Next I wanna mention something that isn't technically a boot camp, but I think it's pretty good overall for learning and that is Udemy courses. Now, the problem with Udemy courses is you are not going to be able to get a job with a Udemy course. That's not the purpose of a Udemy course. But what you can do is you can learn certain skills and you can learn them at a very reasonable rate. A lot of these courses are like 10, 15, 20 bucks. And yes, you could learn this stuff on YouTube or just looking at blogs and stuff, but typically the courses are gonna be more structured so they're gonna save you a little bit of time. So you're basically trading your time for money. I have benefited quite a bit from Udemy as well as Skillshare courses in the past. So I am a big fan of them. Just realized that you're almost certainly not going to be able to get a job with just a Udemy course. But with that being said, I am gonna put Udemy in A tier. Same thing goes with Coursera, which is the next one on the list. Now, the good thing about Coursera is they do have a little bit more backing when it comes to companies. So hiring managers, people who actually hire people, recruiters, et cetera, they actually respect Coursera certificates and certifications quite a bit. So Coursera can be a good option overall just simply because of the fact that the hiring managers and recruiters respect those certifications and that can make you stand out. Now that being said, are the courses any good? Depends on the course, depends on the certification, honestly. But overall, I really like Coursera. I'll put that into A tier. Next on the list is going to be Udacity Nano Degrees. Now, this one is really interesting. It's technically not a bootcamp. Basically an online course, it's relatively interactive. So it's essentially just like an online bootcamp, but that's not what they call it. They call it a nano degree. But the ratings for this are actually quite good. So 4.9 out of five on career karma and 4.72 out of five on course report with over 600 ratings. And then on trust pilot, they have 4.8 out of five with over 2,400 ratings. Now, I will say Udacity, just like SimplyLearn and just like BrainStation, they have a bunch of different courses. So when you see these ratings, someone might have taken like a $100 course and the way they presented, it looks like they took the bootcamp or the nano degree. So take it with a grain of salt. But with that being said, a lot of these courses are pretty good. They have pretty good ratings. They range from $1 up to the nano degree is around $2,000. So I would say that Udacity was one of the better options. They have the same problem as all the other ones where they don't have very many testimonials or legitimate reviews, but Udacity was pretty good. I'm gonna go ahead and put them into A tier. So overall, I wanna talk about digital marketing bootcamps in general. When you compare digital marketing bootcamps to tech sales bootcamps, for instance, the tech sales bootcamps just overall have much higher ratings. Clearly, the bootcamps are kind of a better fit for tech sales. They're really getting people results. Whereas in digital marketing, I think a lot of them are not getting people results and hence the lower ratings. So like when you look at tech sales, there's like 4.9, 5, 4.8, 4.7. You look at digital marketing, it's like 4.4, 4.5, 3.9, 3.0. So I don't think bootcamp is the best option for getting into digital marketing. I think an online course, like the one I mentioned, digital career blueprint is definitely the best option. It's by far the best one on the list. The only one that was even close to being close was maybe Udacity nano degrees and they didn't have nearly as many testimonials. So that's just my two cents after looking into a bunch of different digital marketing bootcamps. If you are interested in seeing people who actually got into digital marketing, I've actually done a bunch of interviews on this channel. So I'll put that up right here. You can check that out. There was even a 16 year old who was able to get a job in digital marketing. I'll make sure that goes up here. Gently tap the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video and I will see you next time.