Things I've heard frequently from students and these things are really what inspired me to create this. So the first one is information overload. The boot camp I took was too much information too fast. The term that I hear the most, fire hose, they always say, I feel like someone sent me in a desk, took a fire hose the firemen used to put out a fire and basically this fire hose me with information and I absorbed some of it. But most of it was coming so fast at such a high volume that most of it just went right past my head. A lot of that is because some of that water that's coming out of that fire hose is things that you should have already known before you got in that boot camp. So what we're planning to do here is to try to make sure we give you the opportunity to absorb those things and get those things so that when that fire hose comes on, you can ignore some of that information because some of it you've already retained and it's part of your brain. Second thing out here is the retention. Okay, I got all this information, I felt like I knew it that day, but a week from the class, a week after the class was over, I felt like I'd forgotten 90% of what I learned. So we're going to try to look at some ways to help you retain the information and believe it or not, the retention issue is directly related to the first issue, which is information overload. If you're getting too much too fast, it affects how much of it you can remember, okay? So we'll look at some ways to kind of deal with that. The third thing, unrealistic employer expectations and this is the thing that I hear the most from people that leave my classes and then go get that first job. Now the reason I say maybe here is because what I found is there's actually two parts of the problem. One, there's clearly some an employer expectations that are kind of bloated or out of sync with reality. But I also find that a lot of times, we have to be realistic about what our actual skill sets are. If a job description says I want you to be competent in this specific subject, I want you to be able to run in map scans, I want you to be competent running a penetration test, because you've done it one time in a class successfully does not mean you're competent in it. I want you to think about something. When I first learned to drive, when my dad taught me to drive, the very first time I was able to leave our yard, go down the street, come back and successfully get into the parking garage, I felt as though I had conquered a mountain. But guess what happened a week later? We went out again and I totally sideswiped the big tree at the edge of our yard as I was going out of the yard, this is because I didn't yet understand the intricacies of rear view mirrors and blind spots in your turn radius and all these things. Those things I could not possibly understand from that first lesson. These are things that I went on to learn over time. When you apply for a job that says, can you do A, B and C or are you competent in this area? You need to understand that that means more than have you done it before because just because you've done something, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're confident or you're capable of even doing it again, okay? So that problem, unrealistic employer expectations, I see that as kind of more of a mixture of that plus sometimes we go into a job because we want that job, we want that money, we want that prestige saying we're a pin tester or whatever it is, whatever the hottest job of the day is in cybersecurity. But you have to understand, you need to be able to do these things and be confident doing them and this course is going to help you to get to that point by building on foundations. Four, the thing that I hear, I wish I'd known more Linux/Windows command line before I took this course, all right? This applies mostly the technical courses, but others, as well. Really, when you guys are saying that, what I found out is that's not what you really mean. What you're really saying is you wish you had more experience typing Windows and Linux commands. Now there's a whole little piece that I'll go into about that, and we'll address that, there's some things we can look at. So let's look at the information overload problem first. So essentially, you should have known some of it before attending, this is what I started with and part of why I'm creating this course is to give you some of that information. We should do a better job of getting you clear prerequisites. When we bring you into a boot camp or into a course, yes, as an industry, we can do a better job of making sure that you know what you should have as a foundational skill set coming in. And what I'm telling you now, while I'm putting this course out, is everything that we go over in this course, you should be comfortable doing these things before you take any cyber security boot camp, all right? And you will generally meet most of the prerequisites. Some of it, you may not actually need to know at this stage, some of the things that you get in these courses, you don't necessarily need at that stage. Another reason for me creating this is to take out a lot of the noise and just make sure you have the tangibles so that you can move forward. The other problem, information retention problem. Again, some of it shouldn't be retained, just like some of the information you don't need at this point, some of it you don't need to try to retain either. So part of the challenge is you need to know what parts you need to remember and which parts are just of interest that maybe you can forget about, and then you'll pick it up later when it actually applies. You likely didn't practice applying it in a way that aids in retention and part of the exercises that I'm going to be going into in some of the later parts of this course or this learning path is to really make sure that you practice it in a way that it's going to stick, it's going to be sticky in your brain. Now you were struggling too much with things like entering commands correctly for your brain to retain the important information. If you tell me to go as fast as I can run from here to the next light, that's a mile away, if I'm trying to get there as fast as I can and then you come back at the end and ask me details about the houses that were on each side of the road, probably didn't see them because I was going too fast to get to that light. If you're given so much information that you're rushing to try to get through all the information and the exercises, by the time you get to the end, you made it but you lost a lot of information or didn't even see a lot of information on the way because you were going too fast to get to that point. So we're going to shrink the time limits down and we're going to shrink down the amount of information that you need to try to absorb. Thereby increasing your attention, okay? Now the unrealistic employer problem, we just talked a little about this. Really, some employers are hiring managers really do ask for too much. I'm not disputing that, but sometimes we set ourselves up by going too fast through learning phases, all right? Let me give you an example of what I mean. At InfoSec and other places, we have done a great job of giving you a learning path. Like, look, if you want to be a pin tester, you need to do this, learn this and learn that and learn this. Or if you want to be a cybersecurity engineer or a cloud security engineer, you need to learn these things in this order. That's the best path. But what happens with some people is you do those things but you do it at too rapid of a rate. So in other words, you move on from step one to step two before you've really even had time to absorb and comprehend what you're really doing step one. So by the time you get to the end, you have all these skills on paper, you have some hands on, you can do some things. But deep down inside you even feel, you know you have some gaps. You know you're not comfortable in that role because you know that you're missing some fundamentals. This is generally a classic sign that you just went way too fast. So part of this can be dealt with by slowing down. Let's say most recently, for example, I had a person that was a registered nurse knew nothing about computers other than how to enter the data in her computer at work when she was taking people's blood and stuff like that. Within an eight month period, I took her from knowing nothing to now she's actually a cyber security vulnerability scanning engineer. She runs Nexus and Nexpose and other vulnerability scanners, configures them, understands details about how to plug ins work, can take it and generate reports. And she's working towards a pen test position, in about eight months. I got her to that point, but we did it in a very methodical, slow, controlled way. Now she wants to eventually be a pen tester and she was trying to come in and take all these boot camps and then in eight months, I'll be a pen tester. I've given her realistic expectation that, all right, so to be an entry level pen tester, let's give it 18 months. Get on my 18 month program, go at that rate and I think you have more success. And she's already getting offers now to be a pen tester. But it's because I'm making her go at a rate that she's actually mastering the skills that he step. So just something to think about. Now, the other thing here, I wish I knew more Linux and Windows before I took this course. Let me explain something about what I found that to mean. Because when I first started hearing this about ten years ago from students, I studied and tried to figure out what was happening and how we could get the more Linux. But what they really mean, the problem isn't that they needed more Linux or Windows command line before they got into the course, it's just that they needed their brain to be exposed that way of thinking. Let me show you what the actual problem is. Now there's something called typoglycemia and it's kind of a myth, but there's some truth to it. And let's look at what it actually means.
