[UPDATE: since writing this post, there have been many comments below, including several from the Managing Director of Cerco himself. It's well worth reading all of them.

ALSO, since writing this post, Cerco have amended their TV advert so that it no longer claims the average wage of £37k. Steven Emden, MD of Cerco, has given me the link to the new advert which I have agreed to post here. His dedication to Cerco's company reputation is certainly refreshing in this day and age. Here is the advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6DKF8S5ou4.

Whether or not the contents of this page solely motivated the decision by Cerco to drop the average salary, I don't know, but there is certainly plenty of evidence here to show the power of the consumer opinion on the Internet.]

Original post:

I’m fed up with seeing this company advertising on TV and implying that the IT industry is overpaid and easy. They claim the average salary for an IT support professional is 37 grand! Yeah right. This is no more than a useless statistic engineered to sell their training. I know lots of IT support professionals, most of whom being MCSE and MCSA qualified with many years’ experience, and none of them makes £37k. I just had a quick look on Monster, and there are jobs in central London for “senior IT support” at just £25k, which for London is a pittance.

Frankly, IT support people are generally pretty overworked and underpaid in my experience. Yeah, you can make good money in IT… if you’re good and you have loads of experience. Your average Windows network support guy / gal is going to be lucky to see north of 20 grand. If you’re not already in IT and Cerco are telling you that one of their training courses is going to open up a big money job for you, forget it.

Let’s do another test, this time with TotalJobs.com. Putting in a search for IT Support within 100 mile radius of London reveals 4,495 jobs (as of today). Let’s now apply a salary filter so it will only return jobs paying more than £35k per year. Now it returns 2,066 results, a large number of which get returned despite not actually having any published salary. Put the filter up to £40k, and there’s 1,599 jobs, and again loads of them don’t actually have a salary entered (and I’ll bet it isn’t £37k on offer). Of the jobs that are left that are genuine, the skills listed are Java, J2EE, Oracle, UNIX etc. – the kind of stuff you won’t be learning on a beginner’s training course with Cerco.

Cerco’s course (according to their website) is 20 days. Yep. Just 20. They allow 1 day for “Advanced networking and TCP/IP”. How can you learn anything other than rudimentary basics of TCP/IP in one day? The kind of stuff they are teaching might enable someone to get a junior helpdesk or IT support position, but I reckon £37k would be 5 – 10 years of hard work away.

What I find particularly amusing is that Cerco’s online test on their website only works in Internet Explorer. Because of course everyone uses Internet Explorer right? Surely we ought to expect better from a company offering IT training for others?

[UPDATE: the Cerco quiz does now work in all browsers. You can take the quiz here: quiz.cercotraining.co.uk]

And how much does their magical huge-salary-producing 20 day course cost? Well, they don’t publish the price on their website (presumably they’d rather get you on the phone and do a sales pitch on you), but a search of various training forums reveals the astonishing figure of £4,000!!! You don’t even get a recognised qualification.

Cerco also have an Advertising Standards Agency adjudication against their claims of being able to place their trainees in the workplace.

If you really want to do some IT training, shop around online or speak to your local college or adult training centre. Often there are government subsidies for such courses. But, the best way to learn IT disciplines is on the job and in your own time. For example, if you want to learn basic HTML, you could pay for a 2 or 3 day course and learn less than you would be able to glean from a good book costing £20 – £30. I’m a firm believer in self tuition with books. I have a great library, and I refer to back to it regularly. A much better investment than training in my opinion (with the exception of certified training like MCSE, Zend etc.). And, if you can’t pick up these skills on your own from books, then I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe you will be earning 37 grand as an IT support professional any time soon…