 In this video, I'm gonna talk about how you can get an information technology degree and as little as six months using the school, WGU, also known as Western Governors University. And I'm also gonna be answering questions like, is an IT degree from WGU worth it? How long typically is it gonna take you to get an IT degree from WGU, depending on how much time you have and all other related questions that you might have. And WGU is a school that until very recently, until I made this series, I only recommended to my private consultation clients. But to be honest with you, I decided to start sharing it with the general public because this is a great choice for a lot of people out there that don't wanna have to go down the traditional route in order to get a college degree. So in this video, I'm pretty much gonna reveal everything that I've told my consulting clients and I also made a resource for you that is gonna make this whole process insanely easy. It's basically like a cheat sheet for how you can do this as quickly and efficiently as possible without spending much money. So if you appreciate my hard work, go ahead, gently tap that like button and let's jump into it right now. All right, so first of all, I wanna give a shout out to my good friend Josh Madicor. He's basically the king of WGU. Him and I together actually put this cheat sheet together for all of you. And I also wanna say that I made another video about how to graduate from college really quickly, sometimes and even less than a year. And in that video, I talk about alternatives to WGU. So there are other colleges you can go to besides WGU that are also really good. WGU is probably the best one. Thomas Edison State University is another good one. But with that being said, you might want to get a different degree. And in that case, you might wanna look at those other colleges. I will link that video right here. So in this video, I'm assuming that you've already chosen the college that you wanna go to. And on top of that, you've chosen the degree. So in this particular case, you want to go to WGU, which is an online accelerated college. And it's technically not accelerated. It's actually competency based. And that basically just means if you are competent in a certain subject, you can test out of it relatively easily. So most traditional colleges will make you go through that four to six years, which on average, it's 5.1 years. So if it's a more difficult major, it might take six for an easier one, it typically takes four. But at WGU, if you are competent, if you know the subject material, you can very easily test out of those subjects in various different ways, which I'll go over in this video. So you're going to WGU and you've decided you're gonna get an information technology degree. That's where we're starting off in this video. And the very first step that you want to do is you want to contact WGU and you want to send them your transcript. And not only do you send them your transcript, but you want to transfer in all of the different classes and experience you have. So for instance, if you took AP or IB classes during high school, you can transfer those in. If you took some classes at community college, you can likely transfer those in. You can transfer in certificates and certifications that you've gotten in many cases. And in some cases, you can also transfer in things like work experience or even military experience. So WGU is very gracious in what they allow you to transfer in, which is one of the main reasons why I love the school. And by the way, at the time of making this video, I am not sponsored by WGU. I get no money whatsoever from WGU. I know I get those comments sometimes. I wish they would sponsor me. That would be great if they did, but unfortunately, you know, I've contacted them about that and they haven't set that up yet. I just think they are a phenomenal college for the right type of person. So you would be surprised how many classes you can transfer in. And there are tons of different testimonials on YouTube and Reddit, et cetera. For instance, this user on Reddit said that they were able to transfer in 61 credits. 42 of those credits came from an existing degree and 19 of them came from CompTIA certs, right? So they were able to transfer in 52% of the degree right off the bat. This person here was able to get 71 total credits done in just one year. So yeah, definitely make sure you explore your options here. You know, at the very least, you're gonna probably knock out a few classes here or there. Now, once you've transferred all of those in, your counselor at WGU will likely send you back a list of classes that you still have to take. Now, after you've done that, don't enroll yet, right? They might try to get you to enroll at this point and you don't wanna do that. What you wanna do instead is you want to move on to step two, which is you are going to test out of a bunch of the classes that you need to take at WGU. And you would be surprised at how many of them you can test out of. So the way you're gonna test out of them is you're gonna use third-party companies. Now, for the general BS IT degree, you're gonna have to take about 36 courses. And you can very comfortably test out of one class per week, even if you have a full-time job, a family, et cetera. So for instance, this person on Reddit said that they started in March of 2019. They transferred in 43 units and they're set to finish their degree in October of 2020. Now, in many cases, my consulting clients are a little less busy. They're on the younger side and a lot of them are able to test out of like a class per day. So some of these classes, especially the entry ones, are relatively easy to test out of. Now, the three companies that people typically use to test out of these classes are going to be study.com, straighterline.com, and Sophia.org. Now, the thing about WGU, they're a great school, but they don't necessarily want you to transfer all these classes in because if you think about it, they end up making less money. So they don't make it super easy for you to do this. A lot of the time you have to sort of look it up and see which WGU classes match the study.com classes, but what we did is we made this whole process insanely easy for you. Josh and I worked super hard on this. And as you can see, if you look at the cheat sheet, there are a bunch of study.com transfers that you can use. And all you have to do is just hover over it and then click on it and it will take you directly to the study.com class that we'll transfer in for that WGU class. And if study.com doesn't have it, we have either a straighterline or a Sophia.org alternative. Now we have found that study.com is the best one. It's the easiest, it's the most comprehensive, but Sophia and straighterline can be pretty good for some of them as well. And on top of that, we also put these certificates that you can take to test out of these classes on the right as well. So yeah, insanely easy resource for you to use. Definitely check that out. And if you want to save a little bit of money, you can do Shane Hummus at checkout. That'll save you 30% off of your first three months with study.com. And you'll also be helping the channel out a little bit. So basically you wanna go ahead and test out of all of those classes. Test out of all the classes you can because it's gonna be much cheaper and much faster using study.com, straighterline.com and Sophia.org. And once you test out of all of them, make sure you transfer those into WGU and they're gonna give you a list of classes that you still have to take after that. So at this point, we're gonna move on to step number three, which is you're not gonna enroll yet. You are going to pre-study the remaining classes. Now, why are you going to pre-study? Why? Why? The reason you're gonna do that is because the remaining classes do tend to be the harder ones. And your whole goal here is to be enrolled in WGU for the shortest amount of time possible. Ideally, you want to be enrolled for one term, so less than six months. And if you pre-study the classes, it's gonna be much easier for you to go through these courses fast and finish as fast as possible so you only have to pay WGU for one term. So the best possible resource you can use for this is the WGU subreddits. Now, there's a main WGU subreddit and then a lot of the time there's gonna be a subreddit for the specific degree that you're gonna go for. And on these subreddits, they basically share different strategies for studying for these different tests and passing them. So you definitely wanna check there first. There's also a ton of free and very cheap resources online. For instance, you can just look up a lot of the stuff on YouTube. Khan Academy is a great resource. If you're studying something code related, free code academies, awesome. I've used them so many times. And if you're the textbook type of person, of course, you can buy a textbook from Amazon that's a few years old for probably like 20 bucks. So yeah, you wanna thoroughly pre-study these classes so you can get them done as quickly as possible. And whenever you feel confident about your studying, what you wanna do is move on to the final step, step four, which is you finally enroll in WGU and start knocking those classes out as fast as you can. Now, getting a Bachelor of Science in IT typically is gonna take around four years at a normal university. In the United States, the average degree takes about 5.1 years going to a traditional college. At WGU, it is more than possible to complete the whole degree, like all the steps that I've talked about in a year or less. And in extreme cases, you can complete it even faster than that. So for instance, here is a post on Reddit of someone who completed his BS in IT in one month and five days. Now, of course, this person was probably enrolled in WGU for only one month and five days and they spent quite a bit of time outside of that, pre-studying, knocking the other classes out, transferring their credits and et cetera. But still, you can see that this is one of those things where you can get it done much, much faster than a traditional university. Even if you're working full-time, you've got a family, you're super busy, you can still probably knock one of these degrees out in like two years or less. And this is especially good for getting those degrees where you literally just need a piece of paper to get past HR, which this is more and more common in the United States. It's just such a clown show, a higher education here. There's so many examples where you literally just need a legitimate piece of paper that says that you have a degree to get past HR or to even be considered for a job. And WGU as well as other accelerated or competency-based universities are perfect for those types of degrees. All right, so now I'm gonna jump into the spreadsheet and give you a step-by-step example of what going through these four steps would look like. All right, so now we are in the spreadsheet. And as you can see, like I said before, this is a spreadsheet, makes everything super easy. You've got the study.com transfers here, the straighter line transfers here, Sophia.org here, and the certificates and certifications here. So going through those steps, the first step, of course, would be to transfer in existing credits. So we'll go ahead and go down to the tab here. And in this particular case, again, I'm just making this up. Let's say you took AP English during high school, so you transferred that in. And you also took AP economics, so you transferred that in. On top of that, you took one semester of community college where you knocked out the humanities credit, the communications credit, and the math 101 credit. And then on top of that, because of the fact you knew you were going into IT, you took a bunch of certifications. So you knocked out this one, the ITIL, LPI Linux Essentials, CompTIA, Project Plus, Amazon AWS Cloud Practitioner, CompTIA Security, CompTIA Network Plus, and CompTIA A Plus. So you knocked all of those out as well. And then you went ahead and you transferred all of them in. Then you moved on to the next step, which is you decided to take all of the remaining classes at study.com, straighter line, or Sophia. And so as you can see, I kind of crossed the ones out that you would take. And then at the end, you would have these classes left. So that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven classes remaining. And at this point, you would go ahead and you would pre-study all of these classes. You'd go to the WGU subreddit and you would look up different strategies on how to pre-study these as well as pass the tests. So once you felt confident on that, you would go ahead and enroll in WGU and you'd take these classes as fast as you can. And boom, that is basically how it's done. You'd get it done in one term. You'd only end up paying WGU a very small amount of money. And to be honest with you, it's relatively easy to get like scholarships and grants and stuff. So many people graduate from WGU paying pretty much zero money at the end of the day. So they're not in debt. And it's especially easy to do this if you plan ahead. Now one thing I do wanna say is WGU is not for everyone, right? It's an online college. It's completely remote. It's not gonna have the same networking ability that you would have at a traditional brick and mortar college. And there are some other downsides to going to WGU. And I talk about those in this video right here. So definitely check that out. Also comment down below any experiences that you've had with WGU, whether it's good or bad, we wanna go ahead and hear all of that. So for instance, if you were able to graduate with like an IT degree at WGU, maybe it took you three years, maybe it took you less than a year, but go ahead and comment that down below and everybody can learn from it. Check this video out right here. I made it just for you. Gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera. And I will see you next time.