 In today's video, I'm going to show you how you can get a cloud computing bachelor's degree in as little as six months. And this is going to be done by going to a university that does what's known as competency based education. Now, there are several different universities that I recommend that do this. There's about a list of like five to 10 or so, and I've talked about them in other videos, but just to keep this video simple, I am going to be showing you how to do this at WGU, which is also known as Western Governors University. Now, WGU actually has two different cloud computing degree tracks, and this one follows the AWS track. And AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. Now, even if you're planning on going to one of the other universities, if they offer this degree, this video is going to break down the whole process of how you would go about graduating with a degree in as little as six months, and you can apply it to the other universities as well. And this is really exciting because WGU just came out with this degree a few months back. And one thing I really love about WGU is they tend to get degrees that have a lot of demand, right? So they look at the demand and the job market, and then they make degrees based off of that demand. Whereas a lot of other schools will basically make degrees based off of like some Mickey Mouse sort of thing that like people tend to like when they're 17, like they'll make a video game studies degree or something silly like that. And then you end up wasting a massive amount of money and time for a degree that is not going to help you at all in the real world. And by the way, until recently, I only talked about the strategies in this video to my private consultation clients because this is super valuable stuff. And this might literally save you like $100,000 three years of your time as well as a bunch of headache. So if you appreciate me going above and beyond revealing this, go ahead, gently tap that like button and let's jump into it right now. All right, so this is going to be a four step process and you really want to take every single step seriously. A lot of the time I noticed people will skip steps and that will end up costing them a ton of time and money. So the first step is the least important one, but it's still pretty important. And that is you want to go ahead and transfer in all of your existing credits. So you'd be surprised how many credits you can actually transfer in. So this person on Reddit, for instance, said they were able to transfer in 36 credits before they even started. And the reason for that is because WGU and other competency based universities are typically extremely gracious about what they accept. So most universities will sometimes accept AP and IB classes. I've seen situations where they'll only accept an AP class if you had a perfect five out of five score, which is ridiculous. But WGU is extremely gracious about that. Most universities will also accept credits from other colleges, but they can be pretty picky about what colleges they accept credits from. But WGU not only does all that, but they also accept certifications and certificates. They accept many different third party company credits and they accept military and work experience as well sometimes. So yeah, definitely take your time on this part. Talk to your enrollment counselor, get your transcript together, get your work experience, your resume together, etc. In some cases, they'll even accept random little Udemy classes that you've taken. So make sure you really send everything into your counselor and then they're going to give you a list of classes back that you still have to take. And at this point, you're going to move on to step number two, which is you are going to test out of many of the remaining classes using third party companies. Now you might be wondering why in the world would you use a third party company when WGU is already so fast, right? It's competency based, right? Well, there's three really great reasons. It's faster, cheaper, and easier. So yeah, the third party companies I personally like. I know there's quite a few of them out there, but the ones I like are study.com. That's the best one. Sophia.org is my second favorite. And then straighterline.com can be really good for certain classes as well. And using these third party companies can be ridiculously easy to test out of a lot of the classes, especially the entry level ones. Now I've had some of my students test out of like one class per day, sometimes even multiple classes per day using study.com and these third party companies. But if you're super busy, I totally get it. Like you have a family, you work a full time job, etc. You can still test out of very comfortably like one class per week. And with 37 total classes, you can kind of do the math there. You can test out of a significant amount of the classes very quickly. And that's even if you're testing out of one per week. Now, this process can be a little bit confusing because as much as I love WGU and these competency based universities, it's not in their best interest sort of to make this process super easy. And the reason for that is because if you do this process correctly, you should be able to get this degree in one to two terms. And what I mean by that is one to two terms is six to 12 months. And at WGU and many of the competency based universities, you actually pay per term. So if you're able to finish your entire degree super fast in like one to two terms, that means WGU is going to make less money, right? So it's not in their best interest. They don't make this process super easy. So that is why I created a cheat sheet that makes this entire process ridiculously easy. And I put that cheat sheet down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. And here in a few minutes, we're actually going to jump into that cheat sheet and go through this entire process step by step. So make sure you check that out. But once you transfer all of them in, you're going to go ahead and move on to step number three, which is you are going to pre-study the remaining classes. Now, this is the step that I see a lot of people messing up on, right? Because they will say, you know, I don't really want to pre-study the classes. That sounds like a lot of work. And they'll just go ahead and enroll in WGU. And what has ended up happening, I've seen this time and time again, is instead of being able to finish it in one to two terms, sometimes it might take them three terms, right? They'll end up missing that mark by a few weeks or a month, something like that. And then you have to pay the full amount for the entire term. And at WGU, depending on the degree, it typically costs somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000 per term. So that might end up costing you an extra $4,000. So I highly recommend pre-studying the classes before you actually enroll in WGU. And there are two phenomenal resources for doing this. The first one is going to be WGU subreddits and specifically the subreddit for this degree. And the second one is going to be WGU-related Facebook groups. Now, on both of these resources, people will be sharing tips and tricks on how to pass these classes as quickly and efficiently as possible. And they will be sharing strategies and tactics on how to knock out those tests as well at the end. So they will probably tell you the best resources that they found to study for these classes and pass the tests. And these are people who either just passed the tests, like within the last six months to a year, typically, or they are currently doing it right now. So this is the most up-to-date information you can possibly get because this stuff does change. So highly, highly recommend checking out those two resources. Some other really good resources online, of course, will be random YouTube channels, blogs. Khan Academy is great. Free Code Camp can be really good. The Oden Project, I think that costs a little bit, but it's really good as well. And then, of course, you have online textbooks that you can either download for free or very cheaply. And if you are a physical textbook type of person, you can order one of those and go through that. Now, if you're really busy and you sort of have mapped out a plan and you kind of have an idea of exactly how long it's going to take you, you can sort of game this process a little bit by just studying the really difficult classes before you enroll. But I really recommend just studying all the classes if you can. But with that being said, once you feel confident in your plan, go ahead, move on to step number four, which is you are going to enroll and knock the classes out as fast as you possibly can. And it is seriously possible to knock all these classes out in one term, right? You are only enrolled in WGU for one total term, which is six months or less. So here's an example of someone who was able to do it. They were able to knock out 87 credit units in one term. And this should honestly be relatively easy for you if you pre-studied the classes. Now, make sure to reach out to your mentor or professors while you're going through these classes if you are having any trouble with them, especially some of the more difficult ones like scripting and automation or advanced data management. But yeah, I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. You just got to knock the classes out as fast as you possibly can. And your goal is to finish in one term, two terms max. And here is a short testimony from somebody who did take the cloud computing degree. Now, one thing I will say is make sure you look into the track that you go down. There is an AWS track and then there is an Azure track. And depending on what you're trying to get into, one might be better than the other, but the AWS track does seem to be a little bit more popular. And there is seriously a ton of testimonials on YouTube, Reddit, et cetera, of people who have taken these degrees at WGU and they've been able to finish quickly and they've had great experiences. So with that being said, let's go overhead and go over these four steps very quickly. Just going to remind you, the first step is to transfer in all of your existing credits. The second step is to test out of as many classes as you can using third party certifications. The third step is for you to pre-study all of the remaining classes. And the fourth step is for you to enroll and knock those classes out as fast as you possibly can. Now let's jump into the cheat sheet, which I'll put down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. And let's go through an example of what this process would likely look like for you and how you can use the cheat sheet to make this whole process ridiculously easy. All right, so we are now in the cheat sheet and I'll just quickly kind of go over how to use this. So first of all, if you want to go through this process, yourself just go ahead, go file, make a copy and you will be able to edit this sheet yourself. So obviously you can't edit it right now because I'll actually be updating this sheet in the future. So that is kind of the downside of making a copy is if I make any updates, you won't be able to see them. But if you keep this original sheet, any updates that I make, you will be able to see. Now let's kind of go over a little bit of housekeeping stuff. So this column right here, it is going to have the ID numbers for the different classes. And sometimes people will actually refer to the classes by these ID numbers on Reddit and Facebook groups. So those are kind of useful to know. This column right here has the course names at WGU. This column has the amount of units in each course. And this is probably the most important column. This is the study.com classes that you can transfer in for WGU credit. And by the way, if you go to a different university like for instance, Thomas Edison State University, Excelsior, Southern New Hampshire University, et cetera, some of the other universities that allow you to accelerate degrees, you can still use this. You'll just have to find the classes and kind of copy it in here. But it's a great way to sort of keep everything organized. But with that being said, just to make this very clear, this row right here, if you were to take statistics 101 at study.com, which is study.com 0068 class, that would transfer in for applied probability and statistics at WGU. Also one other thing I'll note very quickly, the green basically means it is a general ed class. The yellow means it's a core class. And the red means it's a program specific class. So very generally speaking, green classes tend to be the easiest, yellow classes are a little harder, and red classes are the hardest. But that's just generally speaking. It's not always true. Now the way I made this, I decided to just keep it ridiculously simple. Again, I might update this in the future, but what I essentially did is I put the study.com classes in, and then if study.com didn't have it, I included Sophia. And if Sophia didn't have it, then I do straighter line essentially, except there is one calculus class that straighter line is really good for, it's really known for. So I do include that sometimes. But with that being said, Sophia.org is pretty good as well. Study.com is my favorite though. And then the last thing is you do see certificates over here, and these certs do transfer in for the different classes. So essentially, since you're gonna do the cert anyways, you might as well just knock that out as quickly as you can. So let's go ahead and go over the four steps. The first step, of course, is for you to transfer in your existing credits. So again, this is just kind of an example. Yours may or may not look like this, but in this particular case, let's say you took like AP math during high school, you also took AP biology, so you're able to transfer those in. And on top of that, you were able to take one semester of college and you transferred in communications and economics as well. And then you took a bunch of certifications since you have to take them anyways, and you were able to transfer all of those in for credit too. So right off the bat, you are transferring in quite a few classes, and especially with the technology related degrees, this is very common. Now you're gonna move on to the second step, which is you are going to test out of the remaining classes. So as you can see, you can test out of a ton of classes with this degree. And again, you use study.com to do this, and you can save 30% off of your first three months using study.com if you use the code ShaneHommas during checkout. So they were nice enough to give me a code for this. And not only will you save money, but you'll also be helping the channel out. So if you appreciate all my hard work creating this entire series, which it was a ton of work, then go ahead and do that. So as you can see, after you transfer all those classes in, you only have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine classes left. So you're basically able to transfer in like 75% of the degree. And at this point, you would move to the pre-study phase. So you would start pre-studying before you enroll in WGU. So once you have studied these classes, again, using the WGU subreddit as well as the Facebook groups to figure out the best resources to study and pass the tests as efficiently and quickly as possible. And you feel like you have a good plan and you feel really confident with your knowledge, then you would want to move on to step four, which is you would enroll in WGU and knock those classes out as fast as you possibly can. Now in this particular case, because of the fact that you're able to transfer in so many classes, it is very possible to finish this in one term. Honestly, like I don't want to be mean, but you really should be aiming to finish this in one term. But I do understand if you're extremely busy, that might not be possible. But then you would move on to the last step, which is you would brag to all your friends and family that you were able to get a degree from a reputed top 10% regionally accredited university that is respected in industries in six months. And if you're really nice, you will share this video with them so that they can do the same thing as well. Now I do want to mention a few things about WGU. So first of all, there are other competency-based universities and they may have a degree or a degree track that is better for you. Or for some reason, you just like those other universities better. So definitely look into those other universities. I have mentioned them on the channel. And then the second thing is WGU does have their pros and their cons. So make sure you do your own research with this. I did make an entire video about the pros and cons of WGU, which I'll put right here. I highly recommend you check that out before you decide to do this process.