 In this video, we're going to talk about how you can get a cybersecurity degree and is little as six months while attending WGU. And WGU is also known as Western Governors University. There are other universities where you can do this at, but I'm going to be focusing on WGU in today's video. And we're also going to be answering questions like is a cybersecurity degree from WGU worth it? We're going to be talking about the pros and the cons of getting a cybersecurity degree, how long it's generally going to take to get a cybersecurity degree, depending on how much time you have to put into it, and all other related questions that you might have. And this whole process of accelerating your degree is something I only revealed in my private consultations up until recently. But now not only am I revealing it for you, but my friend Josh Madicor and I actually put together a spreadsheet that is going to make this whole process insanely easy. And we're going to use this spreadsheet to sort of go through this process and you can follow along. I'll put that spreadsheet down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. So definitely check it out. And if you appreciate me putting all this effort into this for you to make this super easy for you, go ahead, gently tap that like button and let's jump right into it. Now the first step is for you to choose the degree which you want to accelerate, which you've already done because you're watching this video, you've chosen cybersecurity. Now there are certain types of degrees that are much easier to accelerate than others. That is something that I've gone over in different videos. But with that being said, cybersecurity is one of the best degrees to accelerate. And there are countless testimonials on Reddit, YouTube, Google, blogs, et cetera, all over the internet on forums of people who have been able to get these degrees in less than a year using the methods that I'm going to reveal in this video. Then after you've chosen the degree, you would want to go to what's known as an accelerated or competency based university. Now this is something I've talked about extensively in other videos. There are other universities that are pretty good. For instance, Thomas Edison State University is a great one. Depending on the major you want to go to Southern New Hampshire University and Excelsior College is also pretty good. And then after you've chosen the university, which in this case we are going to choose WGU because not only is it one of the most common ones, but it's also one of the ones that people have a great experience at. Then you want to move on to the real step number one, which is to transfer in existing classes and experience. So this can include AP or IB classes, college classes that you've already taken, certifications, military experience, even work experience. Sometimes chances are you've already tested out of some of these classes. So make sure you get that information together and send that into WGU. Once you've sent your transcript into WGU in a short period of time, they should send you back a paper that will tell you all of the classes that you have remaining. And it will look something very similar to the spreadsheet, which I have linked below. So definitely check that out and follow along. I will try to keep that spreadsheet updated, but of course things can happen in the future and there might be a few little things here and there that are different. And after you've gotten that back, you're going to go ahead and move on to step two, which is you want to start testing out of classes online, right? So you are not enrolled in the university yet. They might kind of try to pressure you a little bit to enroll. Do it. Don't enroll until several steps down the line. Now with a BS in cybersecurity from WGU, you need to take 34 classes. And you can very comfortably test out of one class per week, even if you have a family and a full-time job. Many of my students tell me that, you know, especially for the earlier classes, you can easily test out of like a class every day or two. Now, one of the great things about a competency-based university like WGU is it's competency-based. So one of the things that that means is that if you are competent, it's very easy for you to test out of those classes. And when you do test out of them, you don't have to buy an expensive textbook, sit through a bunch of classes, do a bunch of group projects where you end up doing the project yourself because some of your teammates don't want to do it. And this is one of the main reasons why you are able to graduate in less than a year and in some cases six months. Now, you might be thinking, oh, employers aren't going to like that. They're going to know that you're sort of like, you know, finding a loophole in the system. Well, with a lot of degrees, employers actually don't care. And with some degrees, they actually prefer people who go to WGU. So there's many degrees out there where they just want you to get a regionally accredited degree. They truly do not care where it comes from, how long it took you to get it, etc. They just need you to have that piece of paper. It's one of these weird things that we're sort of holding onto as a society for some weird reason. Clearly, people can learn a lot of these skills without going to college, but there's still a lot of businesses out there that would prefer somebody with a college degree. And you can sort of see why from a liability standpoint. Imagine if you're hiring somebody for a cybersecurity type position, if there is a breach that occurs, and they see that you hired somebody who doesn't have a degree, you know, it might be one of those things where they get fired, or maybe if you're working for a different company, they could potentially even sue them. So yeah, it just kind of looks good if you have a degree, so to speak, even though it absolutely doesn't matter. I mean, there's like 14, 15, 16 year olds that are like hacking government databases that probably know more about cybersecurity than your average cybersecurity professional. But with that being said, here is a comment from one Reddit user that got this degree, and it basically says yeah, they just a lot of the times people just want to know that you have a semi relevant degree, and they don't really care where it comes from. So the way that you would test out of most of these classes is you would use a third party company such as study.com, straighterline.com or Sophia.org. Additionally, you can get certain certifications which will help you test out of these classes as well. Now in my experience helping people study.com is the one that's just the most straightforward and it's the easiest. And there are people out there that just take this super seriously, like they, you know, they take this one from here and they're just extremely strategic about it. But I found that just telling people to do study.com is going to reduce the friction and just make it a lot easier. But there are some classes that study.com doesn't offer. And in that case, we went ahead and we filled them in with straighterline and Sophia.org classes that you can take as well. And you can see here that many of the classes you can actually test out of with different CompTIA certifications. Now I was able to contact study.com and they were nice enough to give a coupon code to me where if you type in Shane Hummus at checkout, you will save 30% on your first three months using study.com and it'll also help the channel out a little bit as well. Now after you've tested out of as many classes as you can, you want to make sure to transfer those into WGU. And at this point, you're still not going to enroll. You're going to move on to the next step, which is pre-study all the classes that are left. Now the reason that you're going to do this is because once you enroll in WGU, you're going to pay per term. And last time I checked, they charge about $3,500 or so per term, but definitely double check me on that because it changes depending on the program you're in. And you know, they're probably going to raise their prices in the future with all this inflation. But yeah, you do pay per term. So you want to try to get done with the classes as fast as possible. Ideally, you want to get done within one to two terms. Now, there are many different strategies you can use to do this. The resources that I recommend the most are actually just checking the WGU subreddits. So for instance, there is the main WG subreddit, which is r slash WGU. And then you've got the WGU MBA subreddit, WGU business management subreddit, WGU comm sci subreddit, etc. So you will find different strategies on taking these classes as fast as possible and learning the information as fast as possible as well. Outside of that, there's plenty of other free resources or really cheap ones. There's free Code Academy. That's really good. A lot of the time Udemy will have some good ones. Khan Academy is great. That's a free resource on YouTube. I do believe they also have a paid version that's even better on their website. And if you're a textbook type of person, you can easily just buy a textbook that is a few years old. You definitely don't need to buy a new one. So yeah, there are many different ways for you to pre-study these classes, but you basically want to make sure that you sort of just know all the information before you even start. Finally, step four, after you've made sure all those classes are transferred in, you've made sure you pre-study the classes, you are going to enroll in WGU. And then you are going to complete the remaining classes as fast as you possibly can. Now a typical bachelor of science in cybersecurity is going to take about four years. Now there's tons of different testimonials, threads on Reddit, YouTube videos, et cetera, of people that have graduated really quickly. But realistically speaking, this whole process can very easily be done in less than two years. In many cases, if you take it seriously, you can do it in a year or less. And the time that you are actually enrolled in WGU in many cases will be less than six months. Now some people take it to an extreme. They're super strategic about it. My friend, Josh Madakor, for instance, graduated with a computer science degree in less than two months. And there's even videos of people who graduated degrees in like seven days or something like that. I mean, it just gets really ridiculous if you try to speed run it or take it super seriously. But yeah, a ton of these people start off with zero cybersecurity, zero IT experience, and they are able to get their degrees much faster than a traditional university and much cheaper as well. Now while you are enrolled in WGU, I would say definitely check out the WGU subreddit, like I said, that's always a great resource. Also use your instructors, especially for the more difficult classes like the capstone written project, digital forensics, or IT application. All right, so now we're going to quickly jump into the cheat sheet for the cybersecurity and information assurance degree. So as you see here, we're kind of just going to go through each one of these kind of step by step. So in this particular case, you can sort of see all the classes you can transfer in from study.com. You also see all the classes on the right here that you can transfer in through certificates or certifications. And there are a few classes that you cannot transfer in through study.com that you can transfer in through straighter line or Sophia.org. So in this particular case, we're going to just go to sort of step one where you transfer in classes. So the classes that you would transfer in, and again, this is just an example, this is not necessarily going to be what you've done in real life. So let's just say you took one semester of some community college, and you also had some AP classes that you could transfer in. So you took AP English, maybe so you were able to transfer in English 104. And then let's say you also took AP Math, so Math 101 got transferred in as well. And you did one semester of college where you took communications and economics as well. And then on top of that, you decided before you went that you kind of wanted to go get a bunch of certifications because those are, you know, relatively good to get because you kind of knew what career path you were going down, you knew you're going to do something IT related. So you got the ITIL and a bunch of CompTIA plus certifications. And so you were able to transfer in a bunch of classes. Now you would move on to the next step, which is you would take all of these study.com classes. And if study.com didn't offer it, you'd take the Sophia.org or straighter line classes. And these are of course much cheaper and faster than taking them at the university itself. So you would not have to take that many classes in order to finish. So it looks like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So it looks like there's eight total classes that you would have to take to finish. And yeah, that is definitely doable in one term. So you would want to pre-study all of these classes, check out the WGU subreddit in order to figure out how to do that. And then once you feel confident, you would enroll in WGU and you would try to knock these classes out as fast as possible. Now a few other things that I wanted to mention is some of the downsides of going to a school like WGU, which is completely online. You can kind of do it whenever you want to do it. And it's competency based is, you know, networking isn't necessarily as good as if you went to a brick and mortar university that was in person. But in this particular case, the cybersecurity network at WGU is relatively good. So for instance, the cybersecurity club has thousands of members. And there is a pretty strong community of people who have graduated with cybersecurity degrees from WGU as well. So if you do decide to go to a competency based university like WGU, some last moment tips I want to give you is one, go ahead and try to sort of put yourself out there to network a little bit because networking is basically like a cheat code. And you are going to have to put a little bit extra effort into it in order to network effectively if you go to an online university like WGU. And then the second one is make sure you focus on building a portfolio. So a portfolio is basically a demonstration that you have the skills that you say that you have. There are many different ways for you to build a portfolio, but having a good portfolio is almost like a cheat code as well. Now lastly, is a cybersecurity degree from WGU worth it? Absolutely. I think it is a phenomenal choice. It's one of the best degrees that you can get at an online accelerated or competency based university like WGU. Is it for everybody? No, it is not for everybody. There's nothing in this world that is just perfect and it's for everybody. There are pros and cons of going to WGU, which I talk about in this video right here. But with that being said, WGU is regionally accredited. It is respected by most employers. There's always going to be a few hater boomer employers out there that are like, Oh, well, I went to a brick and mortar university. So you have to too. But those types of people are the exception to the rule and you probably don't want to work for them anyways. There is countless examples of people that have left testimonials on YouTube, Reddit, YouTube comments, different forums online that have gone to WGU, many of them that have gotten the cybersecurity degree and they are super happy about it. The most common demographic of people who go to a school like WGU to do this are people who are already in another career. They're typically established. They're a little bit on the older side. A lot of them have families and they want to go to a school that is flexible enough for them to get a degree without having to drop everything they're doing in their life for four to five years. And to be that type of person, you do have to be relatively self directed, right? So there's not going to be somebody kind of like looking over you like in college and there's not going to be a bunch of other students that you're doing it with. So it's not a very social process. And so you're going to have to have sort of the self control to sit down and do the work. But with that being said, there is a trend of younger people going to colleges like this now as well. And there's no surprise. I think I read an article the other day. It said 50% of Gen Z is thinking about not going to college. And the reason for that is because the value of a college degree has been going down for decades. And the price of a college degree has been going up. And at some point it has to reach a tipping point, right? If two lines are going like this, at some point they will intersect. And for many degrees out there, in my opinion, it's already reached that tipping point where it's just not worth it. But with that being said, there are a bunch of alternative options that are popping up like WGU as well as study.com. And I like to call these different options alternative education. I don't consider WGU to be like a traditional university. And this is going to be a massive trend over the next 10 years because people are just tired of traditional colleges. They're tired of having to go to college for 5.1 years on average. They're tired of the old outdated stuff that colleges tend to teach. They're tired of colleges telling you what you should think instead of being a place where you can explore all different types of options. And they're tired of people having to pay $80,000 and go on average $40,000 in debt just to get a piece of paper that will allow them to get a job. So that being said, definitely check this WGU video out. It'll answer a lot of the questions you have. Gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video. And I will see you next time.