One of the biggest misperceptions about the IT industry is what’s required to become part of it. A number of universities offer computer science programs which promise a comprehensive education preparing graduates for IT careers.
While that certainly can happen within a four-year program, there are also additional degree requirements that don’t contribute to what employers are looking for. Though the ability to write well and speak a foreign language are valuable and praiseworthy, they don’t help you do the things that IT employers are really looking for.
The Network Engineer program at CyberTex Institute of Technology, on the other hand, is exclusively geared toward IT careers. Everything we cover in our curriculum is directly related to IT. In fact, the class is designed around the six certifications that employers are expressly interested in when hiring IT professionals, and each unit culminates with the opportunity to take and pass the certification test in our in-house testing center.
That focus on IT is important for a few different reasons.
The first, of course, is cost. We’re able to offer the course at a competitive tuition rate—especially when compared with a four-year university—because we’re only teaching computer network knowledge to a select group of students. A university, by contrast, has degree requirements requiring a lot of professors with a lot of different background to staff a campus that may be many times larger than ours.
The second is the ability to condense a program into 37 ½ weeks. Colleges typically operate on a semester system, in which a student takes a slate of classes over a fifteen- or sixteen-week period of time. In the early going, it’s likely that most or even all of a student’s coursework is covering prerequisites that have nothing to do with IT.
At CyberTex, units are anywhere from five to seven weeks long, and they all focus on IT. Everything a student learns will be geared toward the six certifications that employers look for when they’re sizing up prospective employees. Typically, in a college setting, the classes won’t expressly prepare a student for certification exams, and students will likely have to seek out that process on their own.
Because it takes under a year for a CyberTex student to complete the Network Engineer program, that student can get into the job market much faster than a student immersed in a four-year program. In the time it would take a student to complete an undergraduate degree, a student can complete a CyberTex program and accumulate three years of experience in the IT field—experience that can lead to the most coveted IT jobs.
Another thing you’ll notice about CyberTex is where classes are conducted. Both our Austin and Killeen campuses are in office buildings rather than large, sprawling campuses that can be hard to navigate, hard to park in, and expensive to maintain—an expense that can then be passed on to students. At CyberTex, we’d rather focus on computer equipment, a no-frills setting, and an easy-in, easy-out campus geared toward students who work as well as take classes.
If you’re ready to get started on an IT career and were concerned that a computer science degree was the only way to go about it, look at how to get started with Cybertex’s admission process. It’s a most cost-conscious, faster route to a new career path in IT.