All right, so we have a highly requested video today. It's going to be all about whether the Google certification program is worth it. Now, you might be asking yourself, what exactly are Google certificates? Well, this is the company Google's attempt to basically create more people, more people who have certain skills and high growth fields. Now, showing on the screen right now is going to be basically the Google certification program main page. And these are job-ready skills you can put to work, right? So this is going to fast track you to get jobs in high growth fields. So what they claim in here is there's no experience necessary. 1.3 million in demand job openings across certificate fields. You can learn at your own pace. It's under 10 hours per week. It's also flexible so you can study whenever you have the time. They also claim that 82% of certificate graduates report a positive career impact in six months. And then the average salary for these entry-level roles across the certification field is about 63,600, which is fantastic for an entry-level job, especially an entry-level job that doesn't require a degree. And then the ones that they offer right now as of recording this video are going to be IT support, data analytics, project management, UX design, which is basically user interface design, and then Android development. Now all of these courses are 100% remote. All you need is a computer and they are taught to you by professionals, so people who really know what they're doing in those given fields. So the next question is who are these courses for? Well, it's important to remember here that these courses are designed to prepare you for an entry-level position. So these are for two different types of people, people who are trying to get their first job or their first professional job and get their first entry-level position, or someone who's looking to completely change careers. So Google claims that the main reason that they started this program is because they had a lot of these positions that they needed to fill in these various fields, but there weren't enough qualified candidates to fill them. So there was an obvious imbalance in supply and demand there, and that's why they created these positions. But just keep in mind that this is teaching you how to be prepared for an entry-level job. It's not going to teach you everything about IT, obviously, but it's going to get your foot in the door so that you know the basics so that you can get that entry-level job and then learn the rest from there. Now obviously Google is a huge brand name company. The brand name of Google does hold a lot of weight. So getting a certificate from Google is probably more impressive than getting a certificate from some random company that nobody knows about. I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong. It could be that this other random company does a lot better job teaching people, but the truth is brand name recognition is incredibly powerful. That's one thing I've talked about on this channel is sometimes when you're choosing a college, it's best to go with the college that has that brand name, but a lot of people know about just simply because of familiarity. Same thing goes for choosing a company you want to work for a lot of the time. It's going to be a good idea for you to go for that Fortune 500, that Fortune 50 company, have that on your resume, even if later on down the line you don't want to work for them because of that brand name recognition. Now when it comes to cost, these Google certificate programs are hosted on Coursera, which is very similar to like Skillshare or Teachable, basically all these different sites where people are able to create courses and then sell them on these sites. And Coursera, last time I checked the subscription for them was about $50 per month, and these courses generally are going to take about six months to take. So $50 times six months, that's going to be a $300 total price tag. Now if you compare that to going to a university, universities are four years of your life, right? So that's a long period of time. And then on top of that, they cost on average about $80,000 and people end up going around $40,000 in student loan debt. So six months, $300 versus $80,000 in four years of your life. Definitely when you compare them that way, you can see why this would be a very attractive option. And like I said before, Google designed these programs to prepare you for fields where there's a lot of need, right? The supply and demand has an imbalance there. There's not a lot of supply and there's a lot of demand for people who have these skills. Whereas university, I've talked about this on this channel a lot. A lot of the times the classes that they teach are very outdated. They're preparing you for a job market where there are no jobs in many cases. And on top of that, it is helliciously expensive. It's just get totally gotten out of control. But with that being said, it's not a perfect apples to apples comparison. A university degree in information technology is not comparable to a six month certification. And I'm going to get into that a little bit later when I talk about my final decision on whether getting one of these IT certifications is worth it. Now, I know there are other courses, but I'm going to focus just on the IT one because that's the most common one that people have taken. And showing on the screen right now is basically a review that they did on indeed.com of people who have actually taken this course and how helpful they found it. Okay. So 64% of job seekers said that did it help my career progression? The answer was yes. So 64% said that it did help their career progression? 42% said earning their Google IT support professional certification helped them make more money. 37% said earning their Google IT support professional certification helped them get a job. And 94% said they would recommend a family member or friend earn their Google IT support professional certification. Right. So let's break down these numbers step by step. Okay. So 64% of job seekers said that it helped my career progression. When you look at college degrees and how many people regret getting a college degree in terms of like going into that debt in order to get it, you see very similar numbers around half of the people who get a college degree actually regret it. Now, there's varying degrees of regret. Some of them just simply regret it because of the loans that they had to take out. Others regretted it because it was too stressful or something along those lines. Now 42% said earning their Google IT support professional certification helped them make more money. That's actually not bad at all. Almost half of the people said it helped them to make more money. When you look at the amount of people who go to college and don't even finish it, you see that, you know, a number like this, it doesn't look great at first. Like, okay, 42% that doesn't look all that impressive. But a lot of people start things and then they don't even finish them. This is one of the biggest complaints that people who create courses have is people will buy their courses on Skillshare or Teachable and then you can actually look to see how much of the course that they've finished and most people don't even finish the courses. So 42% saying that it actually, you know, helped them to make more money is pretty good. 37% said earning their Google IT support professional certification helped them get a job. Also not too bad, especially considering the fact that many of these people probably were already working in IT and maybe they were just trying to get an advancement or some type of pay raise. And then 94% said they would recommend a family member or friend earn their Google IT support professional certification. So that definitely is a positive sign because there's a lot of like life circumstances that these people might be going through where in their particular circumstance, maybe it didn't help them out all that much, but maybe they already had an IT degree for instance and they were kind of just taking it to brush up on things. But 94% of them recommending it is a very positive sign. Okay, so all of this sounds great. Let me start talking about the downside and kind of give you my final conclusion on this. First of all, you definitely can't compare getting an IT degree for instance to getting a six month IT certification, even if it is from Google. Those two things absolutely are not comparable. The IT degree is going to hold much more weight every single time. But with that being said, in many cases, and I've actually done interviews with people who are in IT on this channel, I did two different interviews. You can check them out on the channel. They say that you don't need to get a degree to go into IT or if you do get a degree, you can get one from a university like Western Governor University and do the degree in like maybe one to two years instead of four years. There are some fields out there, especially in technology where you don't have to get a full four year degree or at least a traditional four year degree in order to break into an entry level role. So I'm really loving this trend that I'm seeing from companies like Google where they're creating these courses to fill actual needs in the economy, right? Where there's a clear supply and demand imbalance. Whereas universities on the other hand are trying to create that demand, trying to create jobs where there aren't any. And counselors are telling people they're going to be able to get a job. They graduate from the university. They aren't able to get a job or they get a job in something completely unrelated that they don't enjoy. So I'm loving this trend. I'm loving what Google's doing here. In terms of whether it's going to be worth it, I would say if you just look at this from a risk and reward standpoint, you're risking $300 and you know, 10 hours a week for six months. And the reward could be a very good career in an in demand field in one of the best industries that you can possibly work in, which is technology. So from a risk and reward standpoint, there's not that much to lose and there's a lot to gain. However, the truth is your chances of getting a job are not going to be nearly as high as if you got a IT degree from a good university. So I would say if you do choose to go down this road, make sure you supplement your certification with projects that you can show, you can demonstrate your skills. Being able to demonstrate that you actually have the skills that you claim you have from this certification program is going to go a long way for somebody wanting to hire you. So overall, this one does get a thumbs up from me with the asterix that I already mentioned in the video. It's not going to be like some kind of easy button, but I think it is offering some competition to universities. And this is something that I really like to see because universities are just completely out of control when it comes to the costs. That's all for today, though. Make sure you check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. 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