WGU's new BS in Cloud and Systems Administration

[dfrecore]

Looks interesting.  Exactly what my husband's company is looking for.  Until you look into it a little further.

You get 12 certs through this, but unfortunately only one of them is a valuable one that my husband really wants (the Amazon AWS SysOps).  I wish WGU would get some better certs going - my husband is not a fan of CompTIA, and at his level, this is not a cert that he would even put on his resume (they literally have zero value to him).

Where is the CISSP, the VMWare, Citrix, Cisco?  Where are the Cloud-specific certs (besides CompTIA)?

WGU needs to step up their cert game...just including a bunch of random certs that aren't that valuable doesn't make for a pressing reason to get the degree, unfortunately.

[jsd]

Cisco is in my program (or the new version of what was my program, now called BS Network Operations and Security). The BS Cybersecurity has Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) from (ISC)² (as well as the SSCP) which is a good one. It'd be hard to add CISSP to the curriculum because it requires 5 years on the job experience, which your typical bachelor student won't have. They do need to flush out some of these lower level certs though... Especially the CIW ones they seem to love that literally no one outside of WGU has even heard of.

[dfrecore]

Cisco is in my program (or the new version of what was my program, now called BS Network Operations and Security). The BS Cybersecurity has Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) from  (ISC)² (as well as the SSCP) which is a good one. It'd be hard to add CISSP to the curriculum because it requires 5 years on the job experience, which your typical bachelor student won't have. They do need to flush out some of these lower level certs though... Especially the CIW ones they seem to love that literally no one outside of WGU has even heard of.

I guess I didn't mean CISSP as much as I meant ISC2.

He's just not a huge fan of CompTIA, which WGU really seems to love.

And for these types of degrees, I'm guessing that a lot of people actually will have some experience in the field, and are going back to get their degrees because they've hit that ceiling.  A bunch of low-level certs doesn't do much for you.  Wouldn't it be better to include some really great ones instead?  They're not much more expensive, so it can't be cost...

[jsd]

I don't disagree that some more higher level certs would be nice, but they're doing that a bit already with Cisco and SSCP (which is the highest you'll get with ISC2 before the CISSP). It'd be nice to see more of this. At the same time, the certs rolled into the program is pretty unique to WGU... IT programs elsewhere will get you a degree and maybe a discount to sit for certs, but they're not included or mandatory like WGU does it. So it's nice that ANYthing is being included.


I don't have anything against the CompTIA stuff though. They're certainly entry level certs, but at least they recognized unlike the CIW junk. Plenty of folks in the programs will be new to the field and CompTIA still holds weight for entry level jobs. Security+ is essentially necessary to work for the DoD in the field. They have their place.