 how to get a bachelor's degree in network engineering and security in as little as six months. That is going to be the topic of this video and I'm going to tell you exactly how you can do that for yourself. And this is going to be done by using what's known as competency-based education as opposed to traditional education. So at a traditional university, you essentially have to attend college for a certain amount of time. Now the average is going to be 5.1 years, but typically it's going to take you around four years at least. This is a little bit silly in my opinion because there are many degrees out there where it is going to take you four years. An example of that would be an engineering-related degree. If you're able to get that done in four years, that's actually an accomplishment. But there are lots of degrees out there that are nowhere near as difficult as an engineering degree. They're not even close to being as rigorous. And yet colleges try to fit everybody into that four-year model. And this is especially bad considering the cost of college in the United States has been steadily going up since the 1970s and the value has been going down. So naturally, alternative universities have started to pop up and they use what's known as competency-based education. And this is where you are tested based on your competency. So if you are really good at a subject, whether it takes you a week to learn it or five months to learn it, if you are able to pass the test, they deem you competent and you get credit. And there are several really good universities out there that now do this. Now the one I'm going to be using as an example in today's video is going to be WGU or Western Governors University. This is probably the most commonly known competency-based university out there, but there are some other really good ones. And there are countless amounts of testimonials on YouTube, Google, Reddit, et cetera, of people who have gone through WGU and gotten degrees in less than a year. And in some cases, less than six months. And in extreme cases, there are even people who have speed-ran degrees and gotten them in two months, like my friend Josh Matacor, who did that with a computer science degree. And WGU is a top 10% regionally accredited industry respected university. This is not one of those crackerjack box degree for-profit scammy universities that you always hear about on the news. Now up to the point of doing this series, I only shared the tactics and strategies that I'm going to talk about today in private consultations. And there's two reasons for that. One, they're really valuable, of course. And two, I didn't think that I was going to be comfortable sharing all of these tactics and strategies because the truth is, not everybody is going to be perfect for a competency-based university. So I do want to make sure to tell you that you need to do your due diligence. There are a lot of pros to going to competency-based universities, but there's also some cons as well. And I'll talk about that later in the video. And I'm actually going to break this down, make it ridiculously easy. I even have a cheat sheet that I made specifically for this degree. And I'll put that down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. And this is going to be a four-step process. And I highly recommend you listen to every single step and do exactly as I say, because if you decide to skip a step or you don't do it correctly, that can cost you months or even years of time, as well as thousands of dollars. So if you appreciate me going through all the trouble of making this series, it took me like hundreds of hours to do this, go ahead, gently tap that like button, and let's jump into it. All right. So the first step is going to be the simplest one, but you don't want to skip it. And that is you are going to go ahead and transfer in your existing credits. Now the cool thing about WGU as well as other competency-based universities, and by the way, you can use this exact process at other universities, you just have to make a few changes here and there. But the cool thing about them is that you can actually transfer in a lot of different things. They tend to be very gracious about the credits that they accept. So normal universities are relatively stingy when it comes to accepting credits from other colleges and even accepting high school credits. I've seen many examples where universities for whatever reason will not accept college credit from a class that you've already taken at another college. It doesn't make any sense at all, but they just decide randomly to not accept the credit. I've also seen examples of universities where they don't accept AP credit, and these are classes that you take during high school. So for instance, you'll take an AP class and you'll score a three on it, which is passing, but the university will only accept somebody who scores a four or even a five in some cases, which is absolutely ridiculous because almost nobody scores fives. So not only does WGU accept those two and they tend to be very gracious about that credit, but they also accept CLEP exams, certifications, and certificates. In some cases, they'll even accept classes that you've taken on random websites like Udemy, and on top of all that, in some cases, they'll accept work experience and military experience. So WGU is extremely gracious about the credits they accept. Make sure you take your time at this step. Get your transcript together, your resume, your work experience, even random classes you've taken on Udemy. Make sure you get that together and send all of that into the counselor at WGU. And once you send that in, you're going to get a list back of the remaining classes that you still have to take. And at this point, you're going to move on to step number two, which is the most important step. And that is you are going to go ahead and not enroll in WGU, but you're going to use third-party companies to test out of many of the remaining classes. So we're not enrolling yet. In fact, we don't enroll until step number four. And they might be putting a little bit of pressure on you to enroll at this point, but don't do it. So I like to call this the test out phase. And you're going to be using these third-party companies to test out of classes before you even start at WGU. And the reason you're doing this, rather than just enrolling in WGU and starting right away, is very simply because it's faster, cheaper, and easier. And there are many examples of people online for some of these WGU classes, especially the technology-related ones, where they will actually test out of like 75% of the classes before they even enroll at WGU. And by the way, this is one of the tracks you can take for the network engineering and security degree. This is the general track. There are other tracks you can take that specialize in other things. And I'll talk about that in different videos. So here's an example of somebody who didn't heed this advice, or maybe they just didn't have access to it, but they tried to take the intro to Python course at WGU, and they found it to be outrageously difficult. And they recommend that you take it at study.com. And study.com is the website that I typically recommend. They're my favorite one overall. They have really good user interface. You actually learn while you're taking the test, and they're just relatively easy. And it's just kind of a seamless, frictionless experience. So study.com is my favorite. My second favorite is going to be Sophia.org. And then my third favorite overall is straighterline.com. Now for this particular degree, you do have to take 37 classes total. And if you use the methods I'm talking about in this video, you can actually test out of all the classes except for 15. So you can test out of well over half the classes before you even enroll in WGU. Now I always like to say this, some of my students, especially the ones that are on the younger side that, you know, don't have a family a full time job, they're super busy, can knock out like one class per day, especially the entry level classes, sometimes even multiple classes per day using study.com. But with that being said, if you are very busy, you've got a family full time job, etc., you can still do one per week relatively easily. You just have to make sure that you're disciplined and you're diligent and you're doing a little bit every single day. And doing the math there 37 classes, one class per week, you know, obviously you can't knock all of them out that fast, but you can knock out a significant amount of them in just a few months. And like I said, there's many examples of people who have knocked these degrees out in a year and a half, you know, a year, sometimes even less than that. And I think it's very realistic, even if you have a full time job, a family, etc., to do it in two years or less. And that's the entire process, including being enrolled at WGU. Now, once you've completed these classes, you've transferred everything that you can transfer into WGU, you're going to go ahead and move on to step number three, which is a very important step that a lot of people skip. And that is you're going to go ahead and pre study the remaining classes, right. So a lot of people skip this step. And I think it's a huge mistake. And there's really two things you want to do. Not only do you want to pre study the remaining classes, but you want to have a realistic plan of how you're going to go about completing those classes. And the reason you want to do this is because ideally, you want to try to knock all the classes out in one term if you can. And if you're super busy, I totally understand, maybe you want to do it in two terms, but you do not want to be in a situation where you're almost done with whatever term you're in and you have like five classes that you still have to take. Because best case scenario, that's going to be incredibly stressful. In worst case scenario, you're going to end up having to enroll for an entire another term just to be able to finish your degree. And unfortunately, you'll have to pay for the whole thing. So you want to make sure that you have a really good plan. And you want to make sure that you pre studied the classes so that you can finish them as quickly as possible. So there are two resources that I think are phenomenal here. These are really the only two resources you need because they will lead you to the other resources that are going to be best. And those are going to be the WGU subreddits and the WGU Facebook groups. So basically, in the subreddits and Facebook groups, they are going to share tips, tricks, strategies, etc. on how you can study for the classes as efficiently and cheaply as possible, and then test out of those classes quickly. So there's the main WGU subreddit, and then there's sub subreddits, I guess you could say, for all of the different degrees and degree tracks. And they will recommend all kinds of different resources depending on the class you're taking. So for instance, they might tell you, Hey, this class is really good. If you go over to Khan Academy, this class is really good. If you go to Udemy, that sort of thing. And then once you feel confident in your preparation and you feel confident in your plan, you are going to move on to step number four, which is you're finally going to enroll in WGU and knock out the remaining classes as fast as you possibly can. Now this step is pretty self-explanatory. You're going to enroll in WGU, you're going to start taking those remaining classes, and you are going to try to finish them as quickly as you possibly can. Now make sure to leverage your mentor as well as your instructors at WGU, especially for some of the harder classes like version control, network analytics and troubleshooting, etc. Now here's what my friend Josh has to say about this degree. This is probably tied for first place with one of the cloud tracks, honestly, in terms of marketability and just how cool the program is. But the caveat to that, I will say it's probably going to take longer than average to complete this one, especially the Cisco track because it has CCNA. And by the way, let's just quickly go over the overall strategy. Step one, you're going to transfer in existing credits. Step two, you're going to test out of classes using third-party companies like study.com. Step three, you're going to pre-study the remaining classes. And step four, you are going to enroll and knock those classes out as fast as you possibly can. Now we're going to go ahead jump into the cheat sheet, which I put down in the description as well as the pen comment below. And we're going to go through this step by step, and I'm going to make it as simple as possible. All right, so we are now in the network engineering and security WGU cheat sheet. And I will just quickly walk you through exactly how to use this. First of all, if you want to do this entire process yourself, because I'm going to be showing an example in this video. But if you want to actually just use this cheat sheet, be able to edit, put all of your information in, go ahead and just go to file and make a copy. This will allow you to edit the cheat sheet. But the downside to this is if I make any updates on it, you will not see the updates. So you might want to check this original cheat sheet from time to time. Now that being said, let's go over some housekeeping stuff. On the far left here, you're going to go ahead and see the ID number for the class at WGU. And the reason that we included this is because of the fact that many times on the WGU Facebook groups, as well as the WGU subreddit, they will actually talk about the classes in terms of the ID number. And the reason for that is because it would be kind of a mouthful or it would be a lot to just type out the name of the classes every single time. And so they use the ID numbers instead. And so this makes it very easy for you to search different classes. So for instance, if you are, you know, taking data management foundations, you would search D426 on the WGU subreddits and Facebook groups. And there's probably a bunch of people who have already talked about that. So that makes everything a lot easier. In this column right here, we have the actual names of the different classes at WGU. This column right here is the units for each class. This column here is probably the most important column. And that is going to be the study.com classes that transfer in to WGU. So just to make this very simple and straightforward. If you take math 101, which is study.com 0013, which again, that's something that you might want to search because sometimes they do refer to them by the class number instead of the class name. But if you take that class, it will transfer in for applied algebra at WGU, right? So I made it mapped it out to be just like super easy and straightforward. Now, if study.com doesn't offer it, we also included alternatives at straighterline and Sophia.org. So for instance, this class right here, web development foundations is not offered at study.com for some reason. But we do have an alternative at Sophia.org that you can take. And in the future, if there are other alternatives or if you know, study.com has other classes that you can take that pop up, we will try to include those on this sheet. So definitely check back because we will be trying to keep this sheet up to date. And I might even make kind of like a webpage on my website that automatically updates it. Now, another thing to note here is there are also certificates and certifications that you can take that will also transfer in for WGU credit. So definitely a good idea to take those in many cases. It is kind of a case by case basis, but definitely can be a good idea to take those. And then the final thing, this final column right here is going to be the type of class. So the green ones are general education, the yellow ones are core and the red ones are program specific. And then of course, you have the capstone at the very end. Now very generally speaking, the green ones are the easiest, yellow are medium and then red are the hardest. Now let's go ahead and go into the four step process. So step number one is going to be transferring in existing credit. So of course, I'm just making all of this up. This is just an example. But let's say that during high school, you took AP economics and you also took AP math. So you're able to transfer in your math class and your economics class. Now you also took a semester of traditional college and you didn't like it, but you were able to finish a class, which is humanities 201. So you also transferred that in and then you decided to take a bunch of different certifications and certificates. And so you were able to transfer all those in because you knew you were going to go in for something, you know, network engineering related. So you might as well knock those certificates and certifications out because they're very valuable on your resume. So at this point, you would go ahead and move on to the test out phase where you would test out of all the remaining classes that you can. So you'd be using study.com to test out of many of these remaining classes. And once you test out of all the classes that you could, you would transfer them into WGU and you'd get a list back that looks very similar to this if not exactly the same. So there's about 15 classes left that you still have to take care of course. And at this point, you would move into the pre study phase. So you would pre study a bunch of these classes, if not all of them, and you would also make a plan for trying to pass the classes as quickly and efficiently as possible. So again, you'd want to use the WGU subreddits as well as the Facebook groups. That's the most up to date information on how to pass these classes quickly and efficiently. And once you felt confident, you would go ahead and move on to step number four, which is you would enroll in WGU and knock out the remaining classes as fast as you possibly can. And of course, the mandatory step number five is you are going to have to brag to all of your friends and family that you are able to get a legit bachelor's degree in a year. And if you're really nice, you will share this video with them so that they can do the exact same thing. Alright, so one thing I always like to say when it comes to this subject is competency based universities like WGU are phenomenal for many people out there, but they aren't necessarily for everybody. There are pros and cons to them and you should definitely educate yourself on that. And also there are alternative competency based universities that are really good that might be better for you in your situation. So I talk about all of that in this video right here, which I highly, highly recommend you check out.