 In this video we'll be talking about the Google IT support professional certificate and whether or not it's worth it. There will be a brief overview of the course. We'll talk about the time to completion, the cost, the demand of the jobs you might go into, the salary of the jobs you might go into, the production value, the chances of landing you a job, and then the overall value of the course. And I'll be ranking all of these on a scale from one to 10 with 10 being the best and then at the very end I'll give you a final score as well as my thoughts on the pros and cons of the certificate and whether or not it's worth it. So if you appreciate me doing these types of videos let me know by gently tapping that like button and let's jump into it right now. So first of all what exactly is the Google IT support certificate? So Google basically came out with a bunch of different certificates in response to the fact that there were certain jobs that they were having a lot of trouble filling and the reason they were having trouble filling these jobs is because there simply were not enough people who had those skills. And so what did they do? They created their own certificate program to teach people the skills that they needed. Right so it says right after the title the Google IT support professional certificate that this is your path to a career in IT. In this program you'll learn in-demand skills that will have you job ready in less than six months no degree or experience required. And this is hosted on a website called Coursera. Now you can actually audit the course for free and you can take the first week of the course seven days completely free. And then after that I believe it's $39 per month and that's $39 a month in US and Canada in other countries is cheaper and they also offer financial aid. And since Google established this certification system it has been acknowledged by many in the industry as a great entry level primer to get into these careers. Now the common job titles that they have listed on here are going to be database administrator, IT specialist, help desk technician, IT support specialist, IT technician, computer user specialist, and IT assistant. Now here's my first small little gripe with a certificate. I know from experience because I've helped people get into these careers quite a bit. The entry level job you're going to get when you first get into IT is very likely going to be help desk. So this sort of thing right here when they list a bunch of different careers like that that just confuses people who are new which this is an entry level certificate. So really they should just tell people to try to go for like the lower level jobs like help desk technician. And I think people would actually have a much better chance of success. The cool thing about when you get into tech and IT is you can go into just about any career path you want. I mean you can get into IT do that for a few years and then become a software developer or we go into cybersecurity or all sorts of different things. So you're definitely not stuck in the help desk position. That's just going to be your first entry level job. And then after that you're essentially going to get paid to learn valuable skills. Now going over just a brief overview of the courses the courses you're going to encounter in their certificate. Course number one in the certificate is going to be technical support fundamentals. Course number two is going to be the bits and bytes of computer networking. Course three is going to be operating systems and you becoming a power user. Course four is going to be system administration and IT infrastructure services. Course five which is the final course is going to be IT security defense against the digital dark arts. Kind of cool. That's kind of like a Harry Potter reference. And as you can see all these courses have either a 4.8 or a 4.7 star rating. So that is extremely good. If you look on Coursera there's a lot of other courses that are still really good that have like a 4.5 star rating. So when you see 4.7 4.8 4.9 that is basically in like the epic category. Alright so now let's talk about the time to completion. Now this is going to get a little interesting because I'm going to talk about the time to completion versus other types of careers as well as the time to completion versus other types of IT related certificates or other ways of getting into IT related careers. So first of all right off the bat they say that it's going to take about six months with about 10 hours of study a week. Now that is completely false right. I think the reason they put that on there is because they want to make it look a little bit better to employers but the reality of the situation is you can get this IT cert done in less than a month and even if you're busy less than two months. This IT certification is not that difficult. It might take you around 30 hours or so and I know this because many people who follow my channel and many of the students that I help have taken this certification and they've been able to knock it out really quickly. So also this is 100% self-paced learn on your own time so you know you don't have to show up to a class. You don't have to do things at a certain timeline. It's all learning on your own time. So there's positives to that in that you can do it whenever you want to. You can do it in the middle of the night if you'd like to. But the negatives is you have to be somebody who actually does the work on your own. You have to be self-driven. Now there are going to be graded exams as well for each of the courses but I believe they're not proctored which I mean I'm not going to just outright say it but if the graded exam is not proctored chances are there's a lot of people who cheat on it. So it's probably not that difficult to pass the exams. So here are a few testimonials from people on Reddit who have actually taken this and they talk about how long it took them to get through it. So this person says it honestly depends on how many hours you can put in on a daily weekly basis. I've been doing about one to two hours a day and I'm more than 60% done with the program in about one month. If you can actually spend four to eight hours a day you could definitely finish it in under a month but if you're only dedicating something like two to three hours a week it could easily take you over six months. This person right here says I just finished in a month and I work 10-hour days at least five days a week right. So this is somebody who's working 50-hour weeks at their job and they were able to finish it in a month. Now there's two really obvious comparisons here. The first one of course is going to be a college degree like a bachelor's degree and that takes about four to five years on average and then the second comparison is going to be a bootcamp which is typically going to take somewhere between like three months to 12 months. So being able to finish a certification like this in probably about one to two months realistically is very good. Now another thing you can compare this to is online courses and I have seen online courses that get people jobs faster than that but it really does depend on the career that you're trying to go for. If you're trying to go for like a higher level IT role of course it's going to take longer but overall the time to completion is very good overall and also good for IT specifically. So I'm going to give this one an 8.5 out of 10. Next we're going to be talking about the cost of the certificate. All right so college costs about $100,000 boot camps costs like $10,000 or more so how much does this certificate cost? Well it's hosted on Coursera which charges about $39 a month after the initial free seven day trial and by the way if you want to check out the course I will link it down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. So if you took six months which is the maximum amount of time to finish it that would be about $234 but realistically if you took two months that's going to be about $78. So that is extremely affordable especially for something that doesn't take very long and could potentially get you a job. Now Coursera does offer financial aid so that's something to look into if you can't afford the $39 a month cost and the Coursera refund policy is after the initial seven day free trial you can cancel it no penalty but after that they do not give refunds right so definitely check that out try the seven day trial but make sure you cancel it before the seven days ends unless you'd want to you know pay the full amount. So I guess that would be a little bit of a nitpick there is they don't have the best refund policy but to be fair the way that Coursera is structured you'd probably have a bunch of people who are just trying to game the system if they did have a full refund and $39 a month really isn't that much to expect and also sometimes they will have promos for Coursera plus which will give you access to like 7,000 different courses it's a little bit more than $39 a month but I highly recommend checking out Coursera plus if you haven't already there is a chance that by the time this video posts they're still doing the promo for that so definitely check that out because I think you'd save like $200 on it and pretty much everyone who leaves reviews for Coursera says that it's extremely affordable so this person for instance I think it did help me get a job I also finished in three months so it was cheap I found the OS portion in the networking section to be great the other three not as much so they said you know oh the other three sections they weren't a huge fan of but you know it's only $39 and it's cheap right so that's one of the great things about the certificate is you aren't really risking all that much time or money so even if you find that you don't really like some of the sections I mean it's $39 a month right and you can compare that to a college or a bootcamp where you are risking a significant amount of your time or money and that's actually one of the beautiful things about these Coursera certifications is let's say you take the IT certification and you don't like it that's great you just saved yourself a ton of time and money because the alternative in the past would have been going to a bootcamp or going to get an IT degree and you probably would have spent $10,000 on the bootcamp or you might have even gotten like two or three years into your degree before you figured out that you didn't like it you would have wasted a ton of time and money whereas with these Coursera certifications you can kind of hop around to different in-demand careers and figure out which one you like and I think that's one of the biggest value propositions of these certs so in terms of the cost there's really no comparison this is by far one of the most affordable options out there this one gets a 10 out of 10 next we're going to be talking about the demand for different careers you can go into with this certification now like I said the real first career you're probably going to go into is going to be IT help desk you might also go into something like support specialist but they do name a bunch of other careers that you could rapidly get into after this to get into some of these careers it would require further certifications in my experience and in my opinion but the google certification will get you a significant amount of the way there so for instance database administration if you type that in on linkedin at the entry level you're going to see 136,000 results for computer specialist you're going to see 140,000 results for support specialist at the entry level you're going to see 111,000 results so tons of demand for these types of careers if you look up computer support specialist on bls you're going to see 875,000 jobs and it's growing at 6% which is as fast as average now the great thing about it related jobs especially like help desk for instance is they are some of the easiest to land to get your foot in the door in the tech industry so I can't tell you how many people where I've seen their first job in the tech industry was in it they did not have to get a degree they were able to get into it with just certifications hello it have you try turning it off and on again then after they worked at the help desk position in it they move up to a higher level position they start making more money and then maybe they move over to cyber security and then maybe they move over to software development or tech sales I think you get the point here IT is a great place to start in the tech industry and then you can go into other career paths from there and tech is the one industry that has the most opportunity out of all the industries out there it truly is S tier and even on the home page it says that there is about 400,000 in-demand job openings in IT and that's probably including all of those other careers so yeah this one is going to get a 10 out of 10 when it comes to demand there is a ton of opportunity here next on the list is going to be salary so on the main page they say that there is a $52,000 median entry level salary and that is likely going to be for a help desk type role so on glass door help desk technicians make about $46,000 a year system analysts make about $86,000 a year and database administrators make about $84,000 a year and there's actually a ton of positions you can rise up into like I mentioned before so for instance IT directors make about $160,000 so for instance anything data related you're going to be making a ton of money anything cloud related you'll likely make a bunch more money as well if you go into software development you'll make more money cyber security tends to pay a little bit better too so there are a ton of opportunities for you to move into within IT as well as outside of IT but still within tech and the way I like to see this is help desk is an entry level job you can land extremely quickly and easily and you are literally going to get paid to learn right so some people see that $52,000 a year and they think oh that's not that much well actually for an entry level job that's great for one and for two you're literally getting paid to learn right so this is not something you have to get a degree for you can land this job and then essentially you're going to get paid to learn and by the time you know somebody else was graduating from college you're probably going to be making it pretty close to the $100,000 a year mark whereas they're going to be $100,000 in debt so when you think about it like that the salary sounds extremely good so I'm going to go ahead and give this one a 9.5 out of 10 when it comes to salary next on the list is going to be the production value and the engagement now this of course is extremely subjective and it has to do with the personality of the instructors but Google typically will hire people to make these courses that are their employees right so these are people who know exactly the skills you need to know in order to be successful they recently got hired by Google so they know about that entire process and when you look at the reviews it tends to be very good now someone on reddit actually went and conducted a survey to figure out like what the best Google certificates were and I believe this certificate actually came out as number one so for some reason they did a super good job with this certificate it's probably the most popular one it's the one that the most people have taken it's still maintained a really good you know 4.8 star rating and if you look at the reviews it's very good so for instance Constantine says the Google IT support professional certificate helped me get a system administrator position because the interviewer was specifically looking for someone who understood networks and active directory this person said the certificate wasn't just the foundation for me learning it it was the foundation to starting a whole career right so out of all the Google career certificates this might actually be the best one when it comes to the ratings etc how many people have taken it so I'm going to give this one a 10 out of 10 when it comes to production value next one on the list is its chances of landing you a job now one of the really cool things is after completing it they're going to give you access to a job board that 300 plus companies use now I mentioned that there were probably more positive reviews for this one than just about any other certificate out there and I'm not kidding when I say that I'm going to go over a bunch of the reviews in this section so here's an engineer level two at Amazon's who says I have hired a couple of equipment coordinators starting position at Amazon IT they only had the Google cert they demonstrated a willingness to learn and even though the Google cert didn't teach them everything the willingness was is far more valuable to me I can teach someone how to do a job I can't teach personality and personal development traits and I've said this many times the types of people who tend to be attracted to alternative education which is what I focus on on this channel tend to be the types of people who are willing to learn right these are the types of people who think outside the box they're not just some sheep who decides to go to college just because everybody else says that they should and that is why employers tend to notice these things and that's why this is getting people really good results so this person says are you me I got the Google cert before I started the A plus they're referring to CompTIA A plus and got hired despite not having any other tech experience when I finished the second part of A plus they didn't even care so CompTIA A plus in case you're not aware is basically the gold standard for IT or at least it has been for a long time and I'm not saying that certification isn't good it's still relatively good but with that being said it's starting to reach a saturation point where so many people have it that it doesn't really set you apart anymore and that's why you see reviews like this where people get the Google cert and it really does set them apart so this person says I'm not at the level of A plus but if you can afford it it's good I actually got a job offer before getting my A plus and all that was on my resume was the Google IT support they asked me about it and they find it interesting here's some YouTube comments from people I can honestly say that this certification did help me land my IT job the company is in the Google ecosystem and they wanted someone with Google experience and knowledge so I applied and put down the certification on my resume I was then offered the job with no IT experience other than that certificate this person says I took the course from November 2019 till May 2020 and I kid you not I landed my first IT job two weeks after I finished the course this person says it was able to land me an interview and a job I had no formal IT experience just self-taught skills and no degree this person says I landed a tier three IT support engineer role after taking this course nine days after finishing it in fact if you take great notes put in the extra effort in late nights on YouTube researching what you don't fully grasp this is an excellent certificate here's another person on Reddit who talked about how they were hired with the Google IT support professional certificate hey all I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has helped me on this subreddit the position is a level one tech mostly bench repair and some troubleshooting of residential thick clients so I feel like it's a perfect entry level fit well they want me to get my A plus they are willing to pay for the test and I have 90 days for 1001 1002 each but I wanted to give a shout out to the Google IT cert I know it doesn't have the industry respect of A plus for entry level right now but I would not have gotten through an interview without it they told me the only reservation they had was my lack of hands on and that I was hired basically off of my interview responses and then later on they go on to say so that's all I know that some level ones help desks are hired without any cert but if it's to get through the door improve you have some knowledge I just wanted to give a shout out to the Google IT in case anyone was considering just do it it will not hurt so this person got a job and then down below they were asked if they got it through Coursera I did and I was able to get it within the free trial period as I already had experience but no certs due to lack of funds got a new better job within three months so they were actually able to finish the entire cert within the trial period which is seven days that's pretty fast this person says I took it and landed a help desk job with no prior experience or other certs being completely new to IT it did break the ice and prep me decently for the interview tech questions the cert itself didn't really hold any weight but the information was definitely good enough to help get my foot in the door so there's basically an endless amount of testimonials of people who have gotten jobs with this cert and I know from personal experience a bunch of people have been getting jobs with this now another thing that they don't really mention that's actually amazing is the fact that if you put this cert on your LinkedIn even if you put that you're just currently taking it many times recruiters will actually start contacting you this is basically like a cheat code recruiters are actually using this certificate to find people to head hunt people for certain positions and then HR does respect this certificate right it's a big company Google everybody knows Google HR absolutely respects anything that comes out of Google now this combined with the fact that you get access to that job board I mentioned before that has 300 plus companies really does give it a high chance of landing you a job for a certificate and also because of the fact that certificates are very common in it they're basically the industry standard there are other careers out there where a certificate might get you you know 50% of the way there or 80% of the way there but it's probably not going to land you a job but an it things are different so you can absolutely get a job with just the Google it support certificate in some cases if you want to get like a slightly higher level position you might want to get another one like comp to a plus but that being said I'm going to give this one a 9 out of 10 when it comes to the chances of landing you a job next let's go over what value the certificate offers alright so it's reported right on the main page that 75% of Google career certificate graduates in the United States report an improvement in their career trajectory within six months of the certificate completion so that's pretty good a lot of people were probably just taking the certificate to brush up on things a lot of people were probably just taking it because they wanted to learn a little bit about it a lot of people were taking it because they were considering maybe going into it and then they decided that they didn't want to so 75% reporting positive outcomes is awesome especially for something that's so cheap easy and fast to take now this is relatively well respected it's becoming more and more respected as time goes on you know companies are realizing more and more that colleges simply cannot keep up with the changes in the economy and the changes in job demand and so certifications are becoming a viable alternative to get educated now one of the great things that they're going to do when you take this certificate is they're going to help you make a portfolio and I cannot state how important making a portfolio is especially in it not only do you want to make a portfolio but you want to make a portfolio that showcases the skills that companies actually want and then you want to make that portfolio extremely easy for people to access right so they have these applied learning projects where you're actually going to not only be learning the skills but you're going to be applying them and you're going to be applying them in such a way where you can actually use that as your portfolio which is awesome so they say here through a mix of videos assessments and hands-on labs you'll be introduced to troubleshooting customer service networking operating systems and security foundational it skills required for an entry level job so not only are you going to learn a little bit of the theoretical knowledge but you're also going to learn practical skills on top of that then of course you're going to earn that career credential and you're going to earn the certificate itself which you can put on your LinkedIn profile as well as on your resume and it says here these skills that you are going to gain are debugging encryption algorithms and techniques customer service network protocols cloud computing binary code customer support Linux troubleshooting domain name system or DNS IPv4 and network model now overall I think the main reason that people are not successful with college or boot camps in many cases is simply because they figure out at some point that they're not interested in going into that career now unfortunately in college a lot of the time that's going to happen like two to three years in when you've already spent like fifty sixty thousand dollars and in a boot camp it might happen when you're already into it to the point where you can't get a refund but the great thing about these certificates is they only cost thirty nine dollars a month so like I said before you're really not risking that much time effort or money and you're probably going to figure out whether this is stuff that you actually like so if you take this it certificate and you don't like it great go check out the UX design certificate you take that you don't like it great go check out the data analytics certificate eventually you're going to find something that you actually enjoy and at the very least you're going to learn a ton about yourself and you're going to figure out something else that you want to do because ironically a lot of the time you will figure out what you want to do by first figuring out what you don't want to do now is this certificate guaranteed to get you a job absolutely not does it give you a pretty good chance of getting you a job yes and for the price of you know seventy eight dollars or even you know two hundred and forty dollars if it takes you six months that is a ridiculous value so when it comes to value this certificate is absolutely off the charts i'm going to give it a 10 out of 10 so the overall score here is 9.57 out of 10 out of all the different google certificates this one has the most positive review so it has the highest score overall i think as long as you understand the value proposition of this certificate you're not going to be disappointed by it the people who end up disappointed are the ones who think it's a free ticket to a job which is not i mean think about it it costs thirty nine dollars a month do you really think it's going to be better than a college degree or a bootcamp but even if it gets you like 80 of the way to a job at thirty nine dollars a month that is absolutely worth it yes you're probably going to have to supplement it with a lot of study outside you're probably going to have to make a better portfolio and work on your resume etc but this is going to get you a significant amount of the way there so this gets a massive thumbs up from me i think the google it support certificate is awesome i love what google and coursera is doing as well and if you're ever wondering what careers are highly in demand just go check out these certificates even if you don't take them just go check out the certs because these are the ones the companies need people in so badly that they're actually creating their own certificates for which is a lot of time effort and money on their part now if you're interested in other really good google certificates i actually made a top five video on that and you can check that out right here