 Are you someone who wants to start a digital marketing career? Or are you someone who thinks that your current career is unfulfilling and doesn't pay enough? Then you find digital marketing, you see how much money they make, you see the kind of lifestyle they live, and you ask yourself, how do I get started? So you search the internet for how to get started, you watch a few tutorial videos, and all of a sudden you get bombarded with digital marketing boot camp ads. So the question is, are digital marketing boot camps worth it? So as you probably know, I have talked many times about how digital marketing is a great career to get into on this channel. One of the best possible skills and careers that you could go into. You don't need a college degree to get into it, and you don't need any experience, and you can get into it within a few months. So you look up a marketing degree, and you see that only two of the classes have anything to do with digital marketing. So you think that, you know, it probably isn't going to be worth $80,000. And so the second thing you look up are boot camps. Now, boot camps are these things that popped up because colleges and many cases don't actually teach you the stuff you need to know in order to do the career. But in some cases, the boot camps can actually be worse than college. And unfortunately, many digital marketing boot camps out there do fall under this category. Now, I'm actually a huge fan of boot camps. I think it's a great part of alternative education. And I think it's great for certain careers. But digital marketing, for the most part, with a few exceptions, which I'll talk about in this video, is not one of them. And in this video, I'm going to talk about why that is. So first off, let's compare tech sales boot camps to digital marketing boot camps, and how well they're both rated. So I happen to know that tech sales boot camps are actually very good at getting people jobs reliably. And if you look at the rankings for tech sales boot camps, you see a bunch of high rankings. You see 4.7, 5.0, 4.9, 4.9, 4.9, 4.9. If you look at the same rankings for digital marketing boot camps, you're going to see 4.4, 4.8, 4.5, 4.5. There is a 5.0, and then a 4.5, 4.7, and 4.6. So as you can see, much lower on average. And that is pretty much true across all the different websites that you can look at, like Career Karma, or Course Report, or Trust Pilot. So overall, for whatever reason, a lot of people are not very happy with their digital marketing boot camp experience, whereas many people are happy with their tech sales boot camp experience. So you have to ask yourself the question, why is this? For some reason, the boot camp learning model just isn't doing a very good job of getting people jobs. Now, there is an alternative, which I'll talk about here in a little bit, that I think is doing a much better job. But let's move on to my second criticism of digital marketing boot camps. And that is the lack of testimonials, right? So whenever you look up testimonials, reviews, interviews, etc. for these digital marketing boot camps, even the ones that are on their sales pages, a lot of the time they are very, very low quality. So what do I mean by low quality? Well, here's a few examples. And I'm not trying to call out these individual boot camps. I'm just using them as an example, but most of them are pretty bad. Even the best ones aren't that good. So General Assembly, for instance, this is a review from Kiki Tolentino. It 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. If you're going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a boot camp, which typically that's what these boot camps cost, even the cheapest ones are like $3,000, $4,000 typically, you need to make sure that you're getting a job. A review that said it gave her the confidence to move into marketing. Like what, what does that even mean? The fact that they are showcasing a review where the person isn't even explicitly saying that this service got them a job is terrible. That's pathetic. If you have a $4,000 information product, you need to prove that you're getting people results. And then on top of that, this is just a small quote. So you have no idea if they just had an exit survey or they just, you know, had the person fill out a questionnaire or something along those lines where it was just like, what was your favorite part about this boot camp? And the next question is, what was your least favorite part? And then of course, they just take out the favorite part and act like that is the testimonial, right? There's no way for you to tell that that's what they did. On top of that, it could be that these boot camps might have had them take it at a strategic time. So right after they finished the boot camp, but before they get hired for the job, they might have them take these as a exit interview or a survey. And it's possible that if you don't give them a good review, they're not going to match you up with one of their partner companies. So these types of reviews, I don't trust at all. These are terrible, terrible reviews just all the way. Here's another review. You folks are sure good at what you do. All the instructors were informative, knowledgeable, and easy to listen to. Again, it doesn't say anything about getting them a job. There's no context to the review. So it might have just been an exit survey or something like that. Just terrible. This is awful. Here's another one. I took admission in the digital marketing course online from Henry Harvin. Now I feel blessed to be a part of the Institute. The digital marketing course online structure and the level of teaching are really appreciable. Mentors gave real life examples to learn the skills in a better way. So again, not saying that they got a job. They're like, I learned the skills. Listen, you can go on YouTube and learn these skills. You can take free classes from colleges and learn these skills. You can go on Udemy and buy like a $10 course and learn these skills. Learning skills is not why you're paying thousands and thousands of dollars. You are paying thousands and thousands of dollars to get a job. Here's another one from Muhammad Z. And I'm not going to read all of it, but basically he hasn't gotten a job yet. He's like, I am finding the course both interesting and challenging. And I'm looking forward to completing this over the next couple of weeks. So he hasn't even finished the course. Why would he be giving a review? And then finally, on the right, we find one where they actually got a job. So that is a legit review. But the problem with that is this person doesn't have a last name. It's just Sandy NG. Sandy NG. So you don't know whether this is a real person or not. You can't look them up on LinkedIn. You can't verify anything about them. So let me give you an example of what legitimate testimonials, reviews, interviews, etc. actually look like. My friend Seth has a company called the Digital Career Blueprint and they teach people how to get into digital marketing. And he has between all of his different social channels Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube hundreds, if not thousands of legitimate reviews. And when I say legitimate, basically he has two different types of reviews. One of them is where he actually interviews people and he has hundreds of these. So you can see people from all different personality types, backgrounds, countries, age groups, etc. and how all of them were able to get a job in digital marketing. And then the second type of testimonial that he has typically shows the person's linked in. So you know this is a real person. You can verify it on your own. And if you want to, you can go and message them. Now these types of testimonials are much harder to get because not everybody wants to be messaged. Not everybody wants to put themselves on camera. Typically the only types of people that will do a testimonial like this are those that are incredibly happy with the service that they receive. I mean you can literally spend like weeks or months going through all of these testimonials. There is an endless amount of evidence that Seth is actually getting people jobs. He's not teaching people digital marketing. He's not providing a good experience. He's getting people jobs. And his online digital marketing course has coaches just like a boot camp would. It has an interactive community just like a boot camp would. And it's all for $800 not you know $5,000 like Thinkful or $3,900 like General Assembly or $9,800 like BrainStation. And I think he has more legit reviews testimonials and interviews than all of the other ones combined. So if you're selling an expensive information product like that that claims to get people jobs you have to provide proof that you're actually getting people jobs right. I mean is that too much to ask? All right my third big gripe with these is there tends to be an extremely varied learning experience. So a lot of people get into digital marketing and they're not exactly sure what they want to do. And there is a lot of different routes in digital marketing. You've got social media management, you've got SEO, paid ads, email marketing, etc. So when you look at the curriculum for a lot of these different digital marketing boot camps, a lot of them focus on completely different things. And what they should really do is help you to figure out which one you like and then show you everything you need to know in order to get your first entry level job. And really I think you should probably do this even before people get into the course. Like you should make it very clear to them exactly what you're going to be teaching them. And this is exactly what Seth does. He actually vets people before they even get into the course. So everybody is very clear on what they can expect. And he has a free master class that tells you which routes you can go, whether or not you have a good personality for digital marketing and all kinds of other things that you would probably want to know before you invested in this type of product. Now you can check that out. I'll link that in the description as well as the pen comment down below. The fourth big thing that I see as a huge problem with these digital marketing boot camps is the fact that many of them do not provide accurate postgraduate outcomes. A lot of the time they'll say, Oh, 90% of our graduates have a job within 18 months of graduating, but they don't actually elaborate on what that means. I mean, if the unemployment rate is 10%, then 90% of people should have jobs within 18 months, right? That would make sense. So do they have a job in digital marketing? Do they have a part-time job? Do they have a full time job doing something completely unrelated? Or were they already working in a job when they first started and then they just continued working in that job after they finished the boot camp? A lot of them do not elaborate on this. And I get it. To be honest, it would be really hard to keep accurate track of these things. And that's why testimonials are so important. But like I said before, a lot of these boot camps don't have very good testimonials. In many cases, it's just people saying, Oh, the information was good or, Oh, I really liked this instructor, not this boot camp helped me get a job. Right? But if you look at Seth's, for instance, there's many people saying, Hey, this helped me get a job very quickly. Seth really knows his stuff. He does a great job teaching. You know, this helped me get a job in two months, et cetera, et cetera. And there's other digital marketing courses that just have really unethical advertising where they say things like, we're going to get you a six-figure job in one month, which is just totally unrealistic. Realistically speaking, your first job in digital marketing is probably going to be somewhere between like $35,000 to $50,000 a year. And you should just treat that almost like a paid internship, right? You're essentially getting paid to learn. Then your second job, maybe a year or two in, you can probably get up to like 70 to 80,000. And then after three to four years, you can probably hit that six-figure mark, which if you go into this right after high school, that means by the time all of your friends are graduating from college, you're probably going to be making pretty close to six figures, which is awesome. But yeah, that's just kind of a pet peeve of mine. When you see marketers that just give absolutely ridiculous outcomes, like they'll take the one student that was just in the perfect situation. The student made like, you know, a crazy amount of money and they were already doing marketing or something. And then they took the course and then they end up getting a six-figure job. And then they just pretend like that's the norm. So the fifth, and this is probably the biggest problem, that is the price. Now I already mentioned this a little bit, but a lot of these digital marketing boot camps range all the way from like, you know, $4,000 to $15,000. And that is a lot of money for a boot camp that probably lasts like three months. I mean, if you calculate that by the month, that's actually more expensive than college. So when it comes to digital marketing boot camps, although I am a fan of boot camps in other careers, I'm not a fan of boot camps when it comes to digital marketing. I think most of them get really subpar outcomes. They're overpriced. They don't have enough testimonials. They don't really track the outcomes of their students very well. And I'm honestly just not very impressed by digital marketing boot camps overall. But like I said, that online course that I talked about, I am a big fan of that one. It's honestly better than like all of them combined when it comes to the amount of legit testimonials that they have. So that is what I would do if I was getting into digital marketing right now. That's just my honest opinion. Take it or leave it. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. I'll put like a playlist of different interviews that I've done from people who've gotten into digital marketing. You can check that out. Also, gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. And I'll see you next time.