Skills Train

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Hi

Ive just signed with Skills Train for A+,N+,CCNA but have had a bad feeling since doing it.Looking at different forums there is lots of mention of Skills Train but some vague answers. Was signing with them a bad decision ? I signed two days ago so I think I can still cancel this agreement. Also, if I pass this course will I actually get a certificate from Cisco to say I am qualified to work their systems or will it be a certificate from the college to say I have the knowledge ? Please let me know if Im wasting my hard earned cash on this.

Cheers

 

I'm new to the forums and have posted my views and experiences on Skillstrain elsewhere but I'm happy to repeat them where necessary so here goes my 2 cents:

The two main points of unease that have me concerned with Skillstrain are the following:

1. The guarantee that allows you to retake the course at no extra cost if you fail the 'examination'

2. The issue of whether examination costs are included in the course fees

With regards to 1 I have since discovered that this gurantee is essentially worthless. The Skillstrain guarantee seems to only refer to some examination process that is internal to Skillstrain and does not mean the CompTIA A+ N+ exam.

There is an addendum single-page leaflet of the Netpro Plan of the Course that has the following small sentence:

Both the CompTIA A+ and CompTIA N+ examinations are proprietary and are outside the Skillstrain guarantee scheme"

Now I'm not yet able to question how comprehensive Skillstrains A+ N+ course material is (I'm only at the start of the course) and I am giving them the benefit of the doubt, but this opens up a potential loophole whereby should the quality of Skillstrain's course material and the efforts of their online tutors be woefully inadequate at preparing you for the CompTIA exam, you would have no legal redress at getting your money back on the grounds that the course you paid for was not fit for it's purpose.

It does beg the question why Skillstrain, if it's so confident about its courses, would not include any and all examinations within its guarantee scheme.

As for point 2 it seems that (in my case) the cost of the CompTIA A+ and N+ course are covered by the course fee I've paid. However, what's yet again made throughly unclear is that there is a reimbursement process. This means that after you have completed the Skillstrain course, you still have to find yet more money to pay for the CompTIA exams once you have registered to sit them with the appropriate CompTIA exam body (who are a seperate body to Skillstrain by the way. However, Skillstrain do reimburse you this cost later. Again this is not made abundantly clear in talks with the salesperson or within the Skillstrain documentation I have on the course. Quite why the CompTIA exam body cannot bill Skillstrain for my sitting the CompTIA exam is beyond me. Surely there are similar payment methods in place that allow someone else to be billed for a students exam sit? How else would companies who send their own employees onto CompTIA and Microsoft courses pay for them?

It would be useful to hear from anyone out there who has completed any Skillstrain courses to confirm whether they have been able to resit the "real" and important exams after a failure and whether they have indeed been reimbursed the costs of such exams. As it stands I believe no such people are present in these forums yet