Re: Something doesn't seem rightthegreyeminenceOctober 27 2006, 00:52:33 UTC
Welcome to the world of corporate IT training. I just double checked to make sure prices haven't changed lately, and they haven't.
Sun: Average $3000 for a 5-day course, $2100 for three. 5-day courses vary from $2500 for one or two introductory classes through $3500 for higher-end stuff.
Veritas: Averages about $3500 for 5 days, $1400 for 2. Their Windows and Unix prices are identical for the courses I checked.
Symantec: $2800 for 4 days. (Windows and Unix)
HP: $4000 for 5 days.
Run of the mill courses seem to average out to about $700 a day, plus one or two hundred per certification test. The classes I checked are all taught by the vendors themselves; in the Windows world, competition between licensed training companies may be bringing the costs down.
The cheapest one-week course I ever took was $1500, but that was for open-source software, which is almost a different market. (Red Hat didn't get taken seriously in the IT world until they multiplied all their training costs by 10.) The most expensive was $6000, but that was a course on BSD Unix kernel internels tought by two of the four guys who wrote it.
I'm not saying he can't learn equivalent skills for less (of course he can), and he may even find a better price on the same certification, but those numbers are not out of line. Remember, the usual customer for this product is not not the guy taking the class, but his corporate employer's IT department.
Some companies offer the course materials and even practice exams online or on CD. The Sun 5-day courses seemed to go for $400 on CD and $200 online. My experience with Sun's CDs was disappointing, and there's a lot to be said for having an instructor and a lab full of hardware, but CDs may be a workable alternative if Microsoft offers such a thing.
Microsoft doesn't make it easy to price their classes, because they don't actually run any of them themselves. After clicking a few sysadmin required courses in random USA sites, I came up with numbers like:
It's shocking how many of these sites won't even tell you how much the course costs until you've registered for a specific session. (Solartech in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ is one of that lot, by the way. Just in case they come up in your searches.)
Sun: Average $3000 for a 5-day course, $2100 for three. 5-day courses vary from $2500 for one or two introductory classes through $3500 for higher-end stuff.
Veritas: Averages about $3500 for 5 days, $1400 for 2. Their Windows and Unix prices are identical for the courses I checked.
Symantec: $2800 for 4 days. (Windows and Unix)
HP: $4000 for 5 days.
Run of the mill courses seem to average out to about $700 a day, plus one or two hundred per certification test. The classes I checked are all taught by the vendors themselves; in the Windows world, competition between licensed training companies may be bringing the costs down.
The cheapest one-week course I ever took was $1500, but that was for open-source software, which is almost a different market. (Red Hat didn't get taken seriously in the IT world until they multiplied all their training costs by 10.) The most expensive was $6000, but that was a course on BSD Unix kernel internels tought by two of the four guys who wrote it.
I'm not saying he can't learn equivalent skills for less (of course he can), and he may even find a better price on the same certification, but those numbers are not out of line. Remember, the usual customer for this product is not not the guy taking the class, but his corporate employer's IT department.
Some companies offer the course materials and even practice exams online or on CD. The Sun 5-day courses seemed to go for $400 on CD and $200 online. My experience with Sun's CDs was disappointing, and there's a lot to be said for having an instructor and a lab full of hardware, but CDs may be a workable alternative if Microsoft offers such a thing.
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Oh look. And at least some of their courses are available as over-the-counter books, too.
Microsoft doesn't make it easy to price their classes, because they don't actually run any of them themselves. After clicking a few sysadmin required courses in random USA sites, I came up with numbers like:
2-day: $850, $895, $995
3-day: $1400, $1275, $1275
5-day: $2150, $2125, $1995, $2125, $2495, $1995
It's shocking how many of these sites won't even tell you how much the course costs until you've registered for a specific session. (Solartech in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ is one of that lot, by the way. Just in case they come up in your searches.)
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