When I was a student doing my graduation, I was not very sure what should I do OR what technology should I select, luckily I had good mentors to help me out and I choose .net to begin with and was helped and nurtured by my mentors to be a better developer.
But not all students are lucky as me, I know a few of my friends who paid a huge amount of 35,000 INR in institutes who over-promised and under-delivered.
Many such institutes are just there to do fake promises and their only motive is to grab your hard-earned money.
The problem here is that such institutes will take a huge amount of your money and all their so-called “experienced trainers” will read word to word from a presentation slide without explaining what that actually means.
Did you really pay all that money to see someone just read a few points from a PPT and not explain the core concepts?
The modern era on how programming is being thought is changing, today we have sites like Udemy, Pluralsight, where many experienced developers who have worked in that field for decades and are now teaching us. Also, YouTube has many tutorials that can be easily accessed by anyone.
The best thing about online platforms is that if you don’t like the teaching style of one person you can always move on to the next one. OR you can learn the same thing from multiple trainers and gain more exposure to your programming language.
But when you are a fresher you would need an actual trainer in front of you with whom you can interact or ask questions on the spot and this is where programming institutes play a critical role.
Sometimes your friends or someone from your family suggests the name of such institute and only when you join them or attend any lectures you realize four things
- The trainer is not knowledgeable or has half knowledge.
- The trainer reads from a PowerPoint presentation without explaining any points.
- There are no labs for you to practice the techniques you are learning.
- The notes they provide are outdated and are not as per the latest trend in that technology.
Let’s get this straight I am not saying all the institutes are like this, some are really good and have trainers who are good in what they do, over here I am talking about institutes who lie just to loot your money.
It does not make any sense if you pay thousands and thousands of your hard-earned money to the institute where you are getting zero knowledge and then learn from a YouTube channel or from some blogpost.
So now the big question is how do we save ourselves from these money-hungry institutes?
Here are a few of my suggestions
1. Ask for the mentor’s linked in profile
The institute may say that the trainer who is training you has conducted 1000+ classes for that technology, do not fall for this trap, ask for the trainers linked in profile and check it out for yourself.
2. Get details about the refund policy
Every institute has a refund policy, If the trainer is not knowledgeable or the institute did not meet your expectations then simply ask for a refund and move on to a better place.
3. Indirect increasing the cost of the course by adding unwanted programming languages
Let’s go with the scenario that you want to learn Swift programming, the institute may say that before you are familiar with Swift we must teach you C, C++, Objective C, and then Swift.
This is a bogus statement, Swift is an independent language and can be learned by anyone with basic programming skills, you don’t have to be a programming pandit to know Swift OR as a matter of fact any programming language should only require you to know the basics of programming.
If you really want to brush up on all those topics then please go ahead with the course but then if you don’t want to then, by all means, do inform them that you only want to learn Swift and not all the other courses.
4. Job promises
After your graduation, you took this amazing course only because you were shown how this institute will give you job opportunities, which is a good thing but the issue is that these institutes will have tie-ups with the local startups or mid-scale companies which make you work for 12–14 hours and will pay you less.
Also, the total number of interview rounds you will get will be 3–5 depending on the institute, so do ask them the following
4.1 How many job interview rounds you will get?
4.2 List of interview companies that they have?
4.3 Testimony of students or any technical person from the company who hired students from that institute?
5. Talk with existing students
This is something that the institute will never allow if they know they have a flawed system, so do get a hold of few students and ask them how the trainer is OR how the practical system works and how tests are conducted to get the complete details.
The main motive of this post was to make beginners aware that there are shops out there who just loot your money and give you zero-knowledge, these institutes will blame their incompetency on the students than correcting themselves.
There are online platforms where you can know more about the programming language and get a wide variety of different mentors who can teach you the same programming language.
And if an online learning platform is not your thing, then please make sure you are selecting a decent institute where you get value for money.
Let me know in the comments if you have ever faced any such institutes and what was your experience in dealing with them.
Do share this article with any freshers you know and save them from joining a money-hungry institute.
