 In this video I'm going to be talking about how you can get a bachelor's of science in network engineering and security in as little as six months. Now this is one where there is a ton of testimonials on YouTube, Reddit, etc. of people who have used this exact process that I'm going to reveal to you in this video. Interesting. And this is going to be done using competency based education and the particular university that I'm going to use in this example is WGU or Western Governors University. Now WGU is not the only university that this strategy is going to work with but it's the one I'm going to be using as an example in this video because it's the most common one and it's relatively easy to use the strategy with. But with that being said you can use this strategy with several other universities which I will talk about later in the video. And by doing this people are saving themselves three to four years of time and up to 80 to a hundred thousand dollars in college costs. And on top of that you can actually do this in your free time. You don't have to move across the country, quit your job, up into your life or anything like that. Now if you appreciate me doing this entire series where I go over how you can get a bunch of really good degrees in record time, this whole series took me like hundreds of hours to make, go ahead, gently tap that like button and let's jump into it. Now one thing I will say is there are two different degrees that are very similar. There is the network engineering and security degree that's more of the general one and then there is the Cisco track. So this particular one I'm going to be talking about is the Cisco track. And basically you're just going to be getting a couple extra certifications that have to do with Cisco. So the Cisco CCNA, Cisco DevNet Associate, and Cisco CyberOps Associate. And this is going to be a four step process and it's very important that you follow all of the steps exactly as I say them because if you skip a step or you don't do it correctly it's probably going to cost you a bunch of extra time and money. So step number one is you want to go ahead and transfer in your existing classes. Now at normal universities they're very stingy about the classes they accept, WGU tends to be extremely gracious with it. So not only do they accept the usual stuff like university credit, AP, and IB exams that you might have taken during high school, but on top of that they will accept things like certificates and certifications, CLEP exams, random classes that you took on Udemy even, as well as work experience and military experience in certain cases. So make sure you get your transcript together, your resume, your work experience, etc. Send all of that into your counselor at WGU and wait for them to tell you which classes you can test out of and send you a list of classes that you still have to take. And at that point you can go ahead move on to step number two which is probably the most important step and that is you are going to go ahead and test out of as many classes as you can using third-party companies. Now this is an incredibly important step and this is where most of the magic is. And the reason for that is with these third party companies you can test out these classes cheap, fast, and easy. And especially with the entry-level classes I have seen students do multiple classes per day. That's how easy some of the entry-level classes are if you use these third-party companies. So my three personal favorites are inorderstudy.com, Sophia.org, and straighterline.com. Now just for simplicity's sake I mostly have included study.com on the cheat sheet which makes this entire process ridiculously easy which I'll put down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. And if I forget to put the cheat sheet I know I did that in one video please let me know sometimes I forget these things I'm sorry. Now for this particular degree you need to take 34 classes to graduate with your bachelors and if you use this guide correctly if you test out of these classes you can actually test out of all of them except for 11. Wait did I just hear that correctly? That's right by the time you enroll in WGU you only have to take 11 out of the 34 classes. That means you're testing out of about 65 to 70 percent of the entire amount of classes that you have to take. Now if you're busier I understand you're not going to be able to do one class per day but try to do one class per week and if you do the numbers there you know 34 classes one class per week obviously some of them are going to be more difficult and you're not going to be able to test out of all of them but as you can see in just a few months you can test out of a bunch of the classes that you have to take and the best thing about this is you don't have to sit through endless lectures that you have to wait for do group projects where you end up doing all the work write a bunch of essays all that stupid stuff that normal universities make you do you don't have to deal with all of that as long as you are competent. So once you test out of all these classes you're going to go ahead transfer all the credits in then you're going to move on to step number three and this is the step that a lot of people skip and I don't recommend skipping it and that is you are going to pre-study the remaining classes. So a lot of people kind of jump the gun here they get a little antsy and they want to just go ahead and enroll in WGU but actually you're not going to enroll till step four. What I want you to do is I want you to pre-study the remaining classes and also make a solid plan on exactly how long it's going to take you to graduate and the reason you want to make a plan is because at WGU you actually pay per term so you pay somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000 per term depending on the degree and so your goal is to graduate as fast as possible and realistically you want to try to knock WGU out in one to two terms. So you don't want to be in a situation where you're coming to the end of your second term or maybe even your third term something along those lines but you still have like five six classes that you have to take because best case scenario you're going to stress yourself out a lot and worst case scenario you're very likely going to have to take an entire another term and that is going to cost you a bunch of extra time and money and I have seen it where people only had to take like an extra you know month or two or even less than that but they have to pay for the entire term. So there's really only two resources that you need to pre-study because these two resources will point you to all of the other resources that you might need and those are going to be the WGU subreddits and the WGU Facebook groups and in these two places there's going to be a bunch of people who either just took these degrees or they're currently taking the degrees and they share their tips tricks strategies etc on how to pass these classes as quickly and efficiently as possible. So they're going to tell you the exact resources that are best to study for the classes and then pass the tests and so they may recommend that for this class you go ahead and take something from Khan Academy or for this class is a really good YouTube channel or for that class is a really good website. So once you feel really confident about your studies and you have a good plan going in and you know you can finish it in whatever time frame you've set for yourself then go ahead and move on to step number four that is going to be you're going to enroll in WGU and go ahead and knock out the classes as fast as you possibly can. All right so let's go ahead and jump into the cheat sheet which I'll put down in the description as well as the pin comment below and I'm going to go through this entire process step by step. All right so we are now in the cheat sheet and I'll go ahead and just take you through this really quickly so first of all there's going to be tabs at the bottom we're about to go through this whole process but you can go ahead and replace all of this information with your own information all you have to do is click file and then make a copy and then you'll be able to edit this you won't be able to edit the you know this one because I will actually be updating it myself so in the future if there's any other study.com classes that come out straighterline classes or sophia.org classes I will go ahead and update that on this list so if you make a copy that's great you can you know change everything to suit your current situation but you also probably want to check the original list as well now going through this really quickly this column on the left here is the class id column so the c957 is the class id for applied algebra and basically the reason that I added this on here is because oftentimes on the wgu subreddits as well as the facebook groups people will refer to the different classes by the class number so rather than you know typing out applied probability and statistics 100 times they'll just be like c955 and so this makes it very easy for you to find discussions for those different classes and so all you do is you just go to the wgu subreddit and then you would just type that class number into the search feature and there would likely be many discussions on it already and then same thing goes with the facebook group in some cases you might also try typing the class number onto google and there might be some discussions on different forums across the internet as well if there isn't anything good on those other two resources the second column here is going to be the course name column so this is applied algebra that's one of the courses at wgu the third column is going to be the amount of units in each course and then the fourth column this is probably the most important one is going to be the study.com classes that transfer in to wgu so in this particular case for instance math 101 which is study.com 0013 if you take that and you pass it you can transfer that in for applied algebra and then these other two columns here straighterline and sophia.org those are the other two third party companies that i recommend and this particular case right here for web development foundations sophia.org does offer it but study.com doesn't so if we find anything else like that for straighterline or we might even add more on here we will be updating this in the future so just keep that in mind and then this column here is for certificates these are the certificates and certifications that transfer in for the different classes and then finally at the very end here general education is in green core is in yellow and program specific is in red and then of course there's the capstone class now keep in mind generally speaking the green classes are going to be the easiest yellow classes are medium and the red classes are the hardest but that's not always true all right so going through the four steps step number one is you want to transfer in your existing credits so of course we're just going to make up a kind of like make believe situation here but math 101 for instance let's say you took like ap math class in high school and ap economics class so you'd be able to transfer those two in and then you also took one semester of college so you transferred in the humanities class as well and then you also knocked out all these certs because you knew you're gonna have to get the certs anyway so you knocked out a bunch of them and you went ahead and transferred all of them in then you'd move on to step number two which is the test out phase this is where you're going to use study.com and Sophia.org in this particular case to test out of many of the remaining classes so as you can see there is a ton of classes that you can test out of and after you tested out of those you'd go ahead transfer all of them in and you'd get a sheet back of the remaining classes that would very likely look a lot like this so you actually don't even have to wait for the sheet because you have this cheat sheet and as you can see there are a certain amount of classes left so I'll just go ahead and do a quick count here one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven classes total left so eleven out of 34 at this point you would go ahead move on to step number three which is you would pre-study the remaining classes now if you're really busy and you also have a good plan going in like you sort of know how long it's going to take you you can go ahead and just study some of the harder classes and you can kind of skip the study on the easier ones but with that being said I really do recommend just going ahead and studying all of them just so you feel really confident going in and once you do feel confident and you have a good plan and you know that you can graduate in a certain amount of time based on your research and based on what other people have done go ahead enroll in WGU and knock out the remaining classes as fast as you possibly can and that is step number four now one thing I will say is if you want to save money on study.com go ahead type in the code Shane Hummus during checkout and you'll save 30% off of your first three months with study.com so they were nice enough to give me a discount code so it helps the channel out a little bit and it will save you a bunch of money and then you would go ahead move on to step number five which is you're going to brag to all your friends and family that you were able to graduate with a legit bachelor's degree in a year or less and if you're really nice you will share this video with them so that they can do the same thing and they can tell all their friends and family about this amazing opportunity now if you're wondering if WGU is the best competency based university or if competency based universities are for you because there are pros and cons to them I highly recommend checking this video out right here because this will answer pretty much all of your questions