CKA: ✅ - Just few word regarding exam vs. LF courses

GreeGTheGeek

Hi dear!

Almost one year after purchasing bootcamp courses I closed it by taking CKA 🎉🎊 (ok, at second attempt 😅).
Even if I'm bit disappointed by my score I'm happy to have finished all of this and acquiring new skills!

I also took the LFCS exam, and I wanted to give my feelings on the very opposite approcheas of exam and courses.
Courses are great: precise, rich, make great focus, mixing text and video. Lab & quiz could also be greats, but are totally insufficients.

Sorry to have to say that, but if you attempt to take that kind of exams, the courses are maybe not what you need.
If you want to learn and understand better the world you are evolving, courses are great.
If you want to have a certification, they are not sufficients.

If I may, I would suggest to add an "advanced training lab" or a "lab quiz" to the courses, with complex use cases to solve (like exam).

For now, i will take a long break, and check if my childs know that's i'm still able to talk about anything else than containers and kube ^^

See U!

Greg

richiemcg

That is pretty much how I feel as I bought the Cloud Engineer Boot Camp to help me break into the field and hopefully find employment.

I have found the course great for building theoretical knowledge but lacking in sufficient amount of practice and since the exams are practical performance based exams it would be nice to have more labs.

We have had post like this before and from other students that are worried about the exams and usually the point comes up that the course is not about teaching the exam and that there is a firewall between between departments but I think this never really dealt with the real issue, a lack of practice materials reflecting real world scenarios.

I think Greg makes a very good point and his suggestion of an advanced training lab is something I have been wishing for too. Usually boot camps are about producing graduates with the required knowledge and skills to enable them to find employment. I do feel that we should have a lot more realistic practical labs. For example, we could download a vm that we don't have the root password for (something I know from experience that does happen), we then reset the password and in docs folder we can find a list of tasks and checks that we have to perform (the more the merrier:)).

A point I would like to add is that I feel that the marketing of the boot camp is misleading as it doesn't mention anything about the prerequisites. There is no mention on the webpage that it is advisable that you take the courses that are available for free on edX before starting, especially since the boot camp builds on the knowledge previously gained from these courses and states that you should complete them (if you hadn't already) before continuing.
This shouldn't really be a problem but since the one year clock starts once you have purchased the course and you are spending a lot of (unexpected) time studying these free courses.... Unfortunately I didn't realise this until after the refund period had passed, I had also paid the full price for the course as I didn't know about the LF sales but that's on me I guess....

Since the webpage does state:

This program will prepare an absolute beginner to learn the most in-demand cloud computing skills in as little as 6 months. Start your new career today.

I think it would be nice to at least mention the courses on edX as prerequisite and/or to include them in the sample study plan, as this would represent a more realist path for the absolute beginner such as myself.

The marketing of the LFCS/K8's courses by bundling them with the exams is confusing as (intentional or not) it pretty much screams 'buy this course to pass this exam'.

The course materials in general are very good but the marketing I feel, is misleading and needs to be remedied sooner rather than later.

takamura

Feel the same than both of you too, to me the course doesn't focus enough on practical and it's a lot to read.

First LFS101X from edx well this is free yes so it's fine but edx is really a bad plateform, navigate through the course content with it is painfull since the summary isn't at the left and the sub-chapter can't be reach directly... For some edx course there is an equivalent on the linux foundation website but not this one.

I would say this is pretty bad since the bootcamp is define for absolute begginer when we look the page : https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/cloud-engineer-bootcamp/
"This program will prepare an absolute beginner to learn the most in-demand cloud computing skills in as little as 6 months. Start your new career today."

So It's will be best if the LFS101X is included inside the bootcamp and linux foundation website for the training.

Also to me, the course is not sufficient as a standalone resources... I feel not enough practice. And maybe add some indication on chapter like some emoticone for cultural stuff, practice, important and so on... The course LFS207 is certainly longer than a 300pages book and it's easy to be knocked out by it... So at the end, it's easy to turn off brain and be passif while reading. I think the course resources is awesome in term of cultur and why? how? etc... question so for someone who is already sys-admin or play with Linux and are already on this field this is certainly awesome because they are already in and interested so they can digest such a theorical course easily. But for beginners, the course can knocked people.

I also, don't like the : "could see more information through man page" that is often present inside the course while we should be beginner and unfamiliar with it. Read man page is a skill on his own and everytime I see that I would like to have a video showing me how to retrieve the information for the command with ease and in an efficient way. This is really hard since some command and options are explain with really short sentence and not easy to understand. Inside the course there is a big lack for the use of man page. And I should figure stuff myself, take many hours for it...

I think course lack also in term of practice, even if their is a lot of lab, I don't feel confortable about LFCS exam at all despite following everything inside the class and taking note.

I find the course really good, I also don't understand why the course is available only for 1y since people pay for it and it's not cheap, course without a bundle cost around 300$ for one. If you forget something and want to comeback to the course we can't after 1y... This is a big thing for me... Since memorize 300+ pages contents is hard.

Maybe also a cheat-sheet or a summary of command etc... Inside an additional resources that we could download could be great.