 how to get a network engineering and security degree in as little as six months. That's what this video is all about. If you appreciate this topic, go ahead, gently tap that like button and let's jump right into it. So this is a bachelor of science degree that you can get from the school WGU, which is also known as Western Governors University. And you can get this degree really fast because Western Governors University uses what's known as a competency based education model. And basically what that means is they don't care so much about how much time you spend passing a class, they care about how competent you are in the subject. So if you are competent enough to take the test and pass them, you can get through these classes extremely fast. Now this degree might also be referred to as a network operations and security degree. And this is a degree you can get and is a little as six months actually enrolled in WGU. And I'm going to share with you exactly how you can do that in this video. The strategies and tactics that I'm going to share with you until this series, until I started doing this series, I only shared it with consulting clients. So paid clients. That's how valuable this stuff is. I've had clients tell me they've saved $30,000, $40,000 that they were planning on spending. They've saved like two, three years of their life. So doing this can be life changing and make a massive difference. But with that being said, WGU is not for everyone. So make sure you look into it. I did make an entire video about WGU, which I'll link right here. Also, my friend, Josh Matacor and I, which Josh is like the goat of WGU, he's an absolute beast. He finished a computer science degree in two months, made a video about it, no joke. And then he immediately got two different offers from feign companies right afterwards. So yeah, he is the absolute king of WGU. And we basically got together and we created this amazing cheat sheet that you can use that just makes this entire process insanely easy. So I'm going to link that cheat sheet down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. All right. So let's get into the strategy behind exactly what you should do in the exact order you should do it in. But before we get into that, I do need to make sure that you've gone through the first two steps, which we're really not going to cover too much in this video, which is first of all, choosing the degree you want to get. And second of all, choosing the correct university. So in this particular case, we're going to go with WGU, but there are other universities that are pretty good. And if you want to get a degree that WGU doesn't offer, you should definitely look into those other universities. And again, I cover that in the video. So the first step, once you've chosen that you want to get this degree is for you to contact WGU, get ahold of a counselor and transfer in all of your existing credits. Now, this seems like a really easy step, but don't rush it because there are actually a lot of different options for things that you can transfer in. For instance, military experience, work experience, certain tests that you've done, certifications and certificates, obviously AP and IB classes and any other classes that you might have taken in college. All of these and more are things that you can actually transfer into WGU and get credit for them. So here is a Reddit post that I found of this guy who was able to transfer in about 25% of the credits that he needed at WGU. Here's another person who wanted to do the degree and he basically had an unrelated degree that he got and then several certifications and he was able to transfer in 61 credits, which is quite a bit. So yeah, you might be surprised depending on how much experience you have, how many credits that you can actually transfer in in this very first step. So make sure you take your time and look into that, get your transcript, send it into WGU and then they're going to send you back a list of classes that you still have to take. And it's going to look very similar to the cheat sheet that I'm going to link down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. So at this point, once you've gotten that list back, you want to move on to step two, which is you want to use third party companies in order to test out of these classes. So the three most common third party companies that everybody talks about are going to be straighterlinestudy.com and Sophia.org study.com is the one that I generally recommend. It's the one that students have given me the best feedback on. And it's the one that Josh says is the best as well. But with that being said, sometimes study.com doesn't offer a certain class. So on the sheet, we did put straighterline and Sophia.org alternatives. And to get this degree, you do have to take about 37 classes. Now, if you're a parent, you work full time, you're really busy. You can still knock out most of these classes at about one per week. It's very easy to do that. I've had students who are in high school or college, and they start taking these classes, and they're able to knock out like one or two a day in some cases. So especially the easier entry level classes, you can get through those really fast. Now on top of that, you can also transfer in a bunch of different certifications. So I put that on the far right on that cheat sheet. Again, just making it ridiculously easy for you. I'll show you the exact certification that matches up with the class. And the reasons that you want to use these third party companies instead of just directly enrolling in WGU is that they are faster, easier, and cheaper, right? So those are three pretty good reasons. And your whole goal here is you want to try to graduate from WGU once you actually enroll as fast as possible. So ideally, you want to graduate in one to two terms. And the reason for that is because you only pay WGU per term. It's not like a lot of traditional universities where you pay them per class. So if you're able to knock out like a bunch of different classes in that one term, then you only have to pay for one term. Whereas if you're only doing one class per term, you'd pay the same exact amount. All right, so once you have taken all of the classes that you can using study.com, straighterline.com and Sophia.org, as well as the certifications and certificates, then you want to move on to the next step. And that next step is after, of course, you transfer in all those classes you've taken to WGU, you're going to have some classes that are left and you want to pre study them. And by the way, throughout this whole time, you have not enrolled in WGU. It's very important that you don't do this. And the reason that I mentioned this is because sometimes the counselors will try to get you to enroll. If you think about it, it's for their best interest. The sooner you enroll, the more money WGU is going to make. So you're going to want to pre study these classes and the best possible resource you can use to pre study the classes as fast and efficiently as possible is using the WGU subreddit. So there's a main subreddit and then there's usually a subreddit specifically for the degree that you're taking. And people will get on there and they'll share different strategies for how they were able to efficiently study different subjects and also how they were able to pass the tests. So that is a great resource. If you're a textbook type of person, you can always order a textbook on Amazon for like $20. There's also plenty of free resources out there. YouTube, which is pretty great. There's Khan Academy. There's very cheap classes on Udemy that are actually pretty high quality. Free code camp is really good for anything coding related. There are just a ton of different options out there for learning this stuff. So once you pre study the classes and you feel really confident about it, you want to move on to the final step, which is finally, you're going to enroll in WGU and you were going to take those classes as fast as possible. Now again, if you're really trying to challenge yourself, you can be like my friend Josh, who literally was only enrolled for two months, right? He enrolled for a single term and he finished his computer science degree in two months. And that's because he took these strategies to the extreme. I think I saw a video about one guy who I think he was doing a master's degree and he just knocked out like almost all the credits, pre studied it like crazy to the point where he was able to just breeze through the material. And I think he finished his master's degree in less than two weeks. So I think that might be like the record of all records. Wow. But obviously for a normal person, that's, you know, that's probably not going to happen. But something that's very realistic for a normal person is this whole process taking around a year. And even if you're super busy, you've got a family, you work full time, if you're diligent about it, you can still probably knock out a degree in two years. That is a heck of a lot better than the average for getting a bachelor's degree, which is 5.1 years. And it's going to be much more cost effective. Many people are able to graduate from WGU with little to no debt. So for instance, this guy who left a review on the subreddit about the network operations and security degree, took him about three semesters to finish it. All right, so now we're going to jump into the cheat sheet. And I'm going to take you through a step by step example of exactly how you would do this. All right, so we are in the cheat sheet now. And I'll just go over this really quickly. So here is the course names right here. These are the course names at WGU, of course. And if you hover over it and click on it, it'll take you to a page, which will bring you to the class at WGU. These are how many units each class is. And then this right here is the study.com classes that we recommend to transfer in. So I mean, it's kind of obvious, but you know, English 104 will transfer in for English composition one. If you hover over that and click on it, it will take you directly to the study.com class that you can take and transfer it in. We have straighter line here as well as Sophia. And then on the right, we've got the certificates and certifications that transfer into now I did contact study.com and they gave me a coupon code where you can save 30% off on your first three months. If you use the code Shane hummus during checkout. So that'll be a great way for you to save money on it. And if you appreciate all my hard work, making this cheat sheet, it also helps the channel out a little bit. So going through an example, let's say we are on step one, which is you are transferring stuff in. And during high school, you took AP economics, you took AP calc, so you were able to transfer these two in right here. Then you also took a communications and art class and a biology class. So you were able to transfer those in as well. And you took those while you were in community college, because you were kind of figuring your life out. And, you know, you took one semester of community college and decided that traditional university is not for you, which I don't blame you. Also, because of the fact that in technology, certifications are so important, you decided to take all of these certs as well. So you took the ITIL comp to a project plus Amazon AWS cloud practitioner, Amazon AWS sys ops administration CCNA comp to a network plus comp to a security plus and comp to a plus. So you knocked all those certifications out because as everybody knows, certs are super valuable and tech. So you were able to transfer all of those in, then you would want to move on to the next phase, which is the test out phase. And as you can see, all the ones that I put the line through are ones that were remaining that you were able to test out of. And you did this using study calm, of course. And then there was one class you did at Sophia, which was the web development foundations class. So you tested out of one class using Sophia dot org. So after you tested out of these classes, you would move on to the next phase, which is the pre study phase. So there's 12345 classes only that you would have to take at the end of all of that transferring in and testing out of. And you would want to go ahead and pre study all of these classes. So once you felt really confident, you pre studied all of them, you use the WGU subreddit to figure out what the best strategies and tactics are to pass these tests as easily as possible. Then you would move on to the last step, which is you would enroll in WGU and knock these classes out really, really quickly. And this is one of those degrees where I mean, you only have to take five classes to finish it if you do all of the transferring in all the certifications, and then all of the taking third party classes as well. So this is one of the better degrees to use this method on and you can really like I truly think that you can knock this out in one term if you use this strategy correctly. So you would enroll in WGU, knock it out in one term. Now again, there are people that take these strategies super seriously. And if you really commit to it, you can definitely get the entire degree in less than a year. And we're talking about all the pre study, all the certs, everything you can do it in less than a year. But realistically for a normal person who's kind of busy, they maybe they have a family, something like that less than two years is a realistic goal for you to shoot for. Definitely check out that WGU video that I mentioned right here. I made it just for you. Go ahead, gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. And I'll see you next time.