About a month ago, I started looking around the net for CCNA and CCNP training opportunities to fill-in my skills as a network engineer. I took a look at several online and CD training alternatives on the web as well as the local community college.
Then a few days ago, I got a call back from a salesperson from QuickCert. They offered online as well as CD training. I wanted to see a sample of their course so that could get an idea of their teaching style and depth as well as the quality of the course material.
After talking to them for a while, their salesman sent the following e-mail to my yahoo account:
"I spoke to my boss and he said he would do the cd-roms for the same price if you wanted to move forward tomorrow. You need DSL or higher to do the demo but here you go:
Login:
password:
Pick CCNA 801 and play with it for a little while (please limit your self to 30 minutes as I have other people demoing tonight). Thanks.
Todd Orzechowski
Corporate Training Consultant
Quick Cert Inc
Specialized Solutions
..."
I used their online CCNA 604-801 demo for about fifteen minutes around 11:00pm Thursday 9/9 (before going to bed), looking at key sections such as spanning tree, routing, ACLs and IOS. There were about 15 or so 30-45 minute very high-level lessons and the video portions flickered excessively.in the morning (around 5 am 9/10), I logged into the demo again to look some more.
That morning, I got a call back from the salesman. I explained to him that I was concerned about the excessive flickering of the video and the lack of depth of the course material. I also told him about my concern that if this company went out of business, I would not be able to finish my online course. The salesman offered me a variety of deals around $1500 with increasing sales pressure pitch and hurried deadlines for the good deal. I told him that I would have to talk to my finance minister (wife) concerning the purchase.
Friday was a very busy for me at work. I was not able to answer several more sales calls (no caller ID when they call). On Monday morning, I had to attend several meetings and could not come to the phone. Amongst the messages waiting for me were three phone messages containing threats that I had used six hours of time on their online training time and that I would have to buy their product or face dealing with a collections agency.
Needless to say, I have decided to attend local face-to-face classes at the local community college which let me sit in one of their classes. Bring on the collections agency. I just tried out their online product. It's not as if I was test-driving a car and took off with it.
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