“All You Can Learn” Courses Are BAD for You
“All you can eat” restaurants are bad for you because you will eat much more than needed and because the food quality is low.
“All you can drink” pubs are bad for you as well for similar reasons. You will drink too much of low quality drinks.
Then, can “All You Can Learn” courses be beneficial for you?
If your answer is yes, this article is not for you.
If you are not sure, then read along.
“All you can learn” courses are defined by a few things.
They do not teach a narrow set of skills such as programming or a specific type of automation. Instead, they go wide and try to cover as many topics as possible.
They have an aggressive timeline disguised as relaxed.
They offer the illusion that everyone can start a career in a short time.
They work on the principle of “more is better” meaning that, the more topics you learn, the better you will be.
They are organised by experts in the field.
But is this a valid thing to do?
For manual testers learning test automation, is more better? Or less?
Someone told me a while ago about an online course dedicated to manual testers that wanted to become QA Automation Engineers.
Out of curiosity, I had a look at the course details.
This is what I found out.
The course is 100% online.
It teaches 2 programming languages from scratch (Python and Javascript).
It is created for people with no IT experience.
It happens over 10 weeks, with 3 sessions per week, each session having 2+ hours (let’s say 3 hours). In total, there are 90 hours of teaching (10 weeks, 9 hours per week).
During Week 1, basic programming concepts and programming tools (editors and IDEs) are covered. Nothing is yet specific to a programming language.
In Week 2, the fun begins.
Over the next 4 weeks, not one but 2 programming languages are covered.
And not any language, but Python and Javascript.
