Cerco IT Training - claim the average salary for an IT support professional is £37,000
I’m fed up with seeing this lot advertising on TV and making out 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?
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 don’t believe you will be earning 37 grand as an IT support professional any time soon…
My name is Steven Emden & I am the Managing Director of Both Cerco IT Training & Cerco IT Recruitment.
I can understand anyone’s annoyance at feeling they have been duped by misleading Statements, I know how I felt the first time I saw a Competitors Advert making the same statement as we now make with regard to the average salary of an IT Professional, but our statement together with those of others have been checked and double checked by the ASA [Advertising Standards Authority] and they have confirmed them to be true.
Where Cerco IT Training differs from the rest is when you come to one of our Open Days [a pre-requisite] for being taken onto the Course, or you check our Brochure or Website, we explain how Cerco takes you from being an Entry Level Engineer all the way through to becoming an IT Professional by way of a mix of additional Courses and paid work in the industry, this is the Cerco Fast Track Career Path Programme.
Moreover if you work for Cerco IT Recruitment on Contract Work, again at full market pay rates, they will pay for your additional Courses which include Network+, Server+, Cisco CCNA Module 1, Convergence + and finally Security+.
These Courses are all one week Courses and the normal market rate for taking each one of these Courses is �1000, so the Package of Courses amounts to a sum of 5k which are FREE to our Contractors.
For those preferring to take a Permanent Job role at any stage of The Fast Track Career Path, we will discount the remaining Courses by 35%
Cerco’s motto is “Learn Work & Earn” and we believe that there is no finer way of becoming an IT Professional whose average salary is �37k than by way of The Cerco Fast Track Career Path Programme.
We welcome anyone interested in becoming an IT Professional to come to an Open Day, be tested for their suitability to be trained on the CCSN Course and for a career in IT.
Please don’t knock us or compare us to others, till you read what we say about how we believe you can command that salary, it’s clearly seen in all our Marketing Material and to be heard at our Open Days.
I look forward to welcoming you at some future date at Cerco IT.
Steven M. Emden
Managing Director Cerco IT Training & Cerco IT Recruitment Ltd.
In the interests of fair debate, I am publishing Steven’s comments and thank him for caring enough about his company and reputation to get in touch.
I stand by my assertion that the average IT professional does not earn £37k per year, and I could call up pretty much all the IT support guys I know and confirm that they earn less than that. Statistics can be made to support pretty much any viewpoint, but I don’t believe it is fair to intimate that ours is an easy industry to get into and make loads of money in. Again, the ASA adjudicated against Cerco’s claims of being able to place most of their trainees into the workplace. It is not necessarily the case that someone who pays thousands for Cerco training would be assured of employment.
Anyone looking to get into IT as a career should consider whether they have the aptitude for it, and test this with free / cheaper locally run courses before committing to large expenditure on a qualification that is not universally recognised. For the price of the Cerco training, one can travel to India, and complete a MCSE or MCSA course in a relatively short period of time. This is universally recognised and will open employment doors, but without on-the-job experience, don’t expect to be paid £37k, because you just won’t get that much.
Thanks David. I am one of the many whose trade is faultering in the UK, so having decided to train for the future I was looking to Cerco. I’m no mug, and I thought the whole training and ‘employment found’ was sounding just a little too good. As you rightly stated, the inital phone call from Cerco no mention of costs for the course were discussed as everything would be detailed at the forthcoming open day. I was preparing for the ‘hard sell’ campaign following the presentation. I think I shall be looking elsewhere for my further education, or at 51, maybe I should just wander off into the sunset.
Again, thanks for the heads up, I sincerely hope others get to read the piece you have posted. Rgds, AS
Is it a coincidence that Cerco sounds like Cisco? Is is this me being a little cynical? The more I delve into this ‘training’, the more I’ve started to feel that I was about to be mugged. Rgds, AS
Ande,
Thanks for your comments. I have no personal experience of Cerco and based this article on their advertising, the ASA report and the numerous forums I have visited. I suspect Cerco have a few large companies with IT call centres that they feed staff to, and that’s how they place most of their trainees in employment. This type of job does not pay £37,000!
There are plenty of good quality training courses out there. If you have good IT literacy already, there are plenty of options for the same price or less than Cerco charge. I can’t comment on the similarities of the name, but as you mention Cisco…
http://www.ncat.co.uk/cisco-training.htm - these guys do 4 courses over 16 days for £3499. Cisco certified professionals do get paid well.
http://www.ptr.co.uk/redhat-certification-course.html#dates - if you fancy an adventure, what about Red Hat certification? Less jobs around, but again, great pay. These guys have courses from £1700.
Those are just two companies I found with a bit of Googling, so I can’t vouch for their training abilities and I’m not recommending them.
http://www.koenig-solutions.com - these guys do everything. Microsoft, Cisco, Red Hat, Citrix, Java, Oracle, CompTIA. I can vouch for them as a colleague of mine did his MCSE and MCSA with them. The only downside is that they are in India. But, the course includes accommodation, is very fast, and much much cheaper than the UK. You just have to pay for your flights. You can pay more for better accommodation if you like. But for £5000, you could pay for your flights and get fully Microsoft certified - getting a job on £23k - £35k shouldn’t be too difficult with that behind you.
Don’t give up!
Regards,
David