Security+ Boot Camp: What to expect during your training

Chris Sienko: 0:00

Infosec and Cyborg hacks are here to help you pass the Security Plus exam. For today's hack, let's talk about bootcamps. If you've been piecing your way through the SecPlus Study Guide for six months or more on your own, it's possible that you would learn better in a concentrated, focused environment with expert instructions, and I'm talking, of course, about Infosec Bootcamp instructor, tommy Gober. Tommy will walk you through the Infosec 5-day Security Plus Bootcamp, what it's like, the learning and memorizing strategies you'll employ, and all the ways that bootcamp training can make the difference between passing on the first try and endless headaches and heartaches of resetting the exam. You don't have to do it alone, but to learn more, you do have to keep it here for another Cyborg Hack. Welcome to a new episode of Cyborg Hacks. The purpose of this spin-off of our popular Cyborg podcast is to take a single fundamental question and give you a quick, clear and actionable solution or a new insight into how to utilize Infosec products and training to achieve your work and career goals. Today, we're going to be doing just that. Tommy Gober is an Infosec instructor and, among his very many areas of expertise, he is our bootcamp instructor for one of the most popular and in-demand certifications, and that, of course, is Tia's Security Plus certification. So for today's, cyborg Hack Tommy is going to take you on a little guided tour of what it's like to take a certification bootcamp specifically with him. So thanks for joining me today, tommy, thanks for having me. So, tommy, to get everyone on the same page, can you briefly explain the difference in bootcamp training for a certification exam versus the other common approaches like academic class or self-study?

Tommy Gober: 1:40

Yeah. So first of all, let me say too that I've done them all. I have studied on my own, I have taught academic classes for college here by me, and then, of course, doing the bootcamps, and so they each have their own way of experience, as I should say. So when it comes to the bootcamp and I was joking with you before when we were talking before I should have got a campaign cover like a drill sergeant.

Chris Sienko: 2:17

Yes absolutely.

Tommy Gober: 2:19

It's not like a bootcamp like that, but your brain definitely gets a workout throughout the bootcamp. It is like drinking from the fire hose. There is a lot, a lot, a lot of information to process in a very compressed window of time, and so you have to bring your A-game whenever you are participating in a bootcamp. It's not a passive experience. We do have folks that go through and they're like okay, I'm just going to veg on the couch and eat ding-dongs all day and I'm just going to absorb and listen to this guy.

Chris Sienko: 2:55

Step three question mark. Question mark step four certification.

Tommy Gober: 3:00

It's like no, you have to participate, you have to engage with this. It's not like you just have to run in the background, Were those old language learning tapes. You put the speaker under your pillow it's not going to happen for you.

Chris Sienko: 3:14

Learned by osmosis. Yeah, right, right.

Tommy Gober: 3:16

Yeah, so we, you know it's. It's a long week. At the end of the week a lot of folks are just like my brain is shot. When I do these face to face with folks, I'm like I kind of walk around jokingly. At the end of the day I put my hands over everyone's head. I'm like, well, I can feel the heat coming off your brain.

Chris Sienko: 3:35

Yeah, yeah, hear the whine of the motors.

Tommy Gober: 3:37

Yeah, the smoke's coming, so there's a lot to process in a short amount of time. That said, we can still get you over the hump of being successful on the exam in a compressed window of time. That is different than an academic class. You were to take it to community college or a semester-long course or something. In those you're going to be able to steep in the content a little bit longer, and so some of the concepts are going to be locked into your brain longer. So you're going to have more of a deep dive into some of these concepts. Because think about it, if I can do it in about five days, if we can go through all this content, but then we're going to spend an entire college semester or quarter on just this one topic there's more time A lot more give and take going on. I imagine a lot more leisurely questions and answers, yeah, and so the drawback to that approach is, of course, time and the time commitment that you've got, the amount of time your employer might have you every day. I got to let this person go so they can go sit in this one class for an afternoon or something and do that for several months. That's just not going to work for some folks. The other problem is that you might get to the end of the semester and you've forgotten what you talked about at the beginning of the semester and then suddenly you've got five questions to the exam about that. That's a difficulty too, and then one that I've seen reflected online. A lot of folks will ask this one, or they discuss their experience of self-study. Self-study completely doable. Plenty of folks do it, but you have to be honest with yourself. You have to be a disciplined learner and, let's face it, how many of us really truly are disciplined enough to sit down and earn through this thing? And so I just recently read a report. Somebody said that they failed the exam for the third time. This is like on Reddit, I think something. And someone said they failed the exam for the third time. They had spent three months studying serious study eight hours a day, and I'm like eight hours a day. For three months you had to have run out of stuff.

Chris Sienko: 5:49

Yeah, what is that exactly?

Tommy Gober: 5:51

That's way too much time. And so how much discipline learning is going on with self-study. A lot of times people say they are studying and the book is just sitting next to them while they're watching Chris's videos?

Chris Sienko: 6:05

Yeah, exactly, and I can't even respect anyone who actually can do that. I've been sitting, I've been using my A-plus practice exam guide for a seat cushion for a while now and one of these days I'll get past page 300 or whatever. So, yeah, there's definitely upsides to all of those, but I want to definitely focus in on the boot camp experience. So you said security plus is five days, right. Can you give us a sense of the schedule for each of those days, like how much of each day is spent on different domains of the exam and what you'll be learning?

Tommy Gober: 6:40

Yeah, so we have a little bit of variation in scheduling for each instructor. We have a team of instructors right, I'm just one of a crew of very talented other instructors. We each have our own take on what works best and our own presentational instructional styles. So my personal structure is we go 8.30 AM until maybe about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. That would be great. It's a full day. We take a healthy one hour lunch in the middle. I mean, a lot of folks are maybe their boss gave them the day off or that week off. They're going to stay at home, or maybe you work from home anyway, so you can just walk in the kitchen and get your. But if you know so people are connecting from the office or whatever. So we get a one hour break for lunch. We have a morning and an afternoon break built in as well, and I say that we wrap up at 4 o'clock each day, but we actually run until about 4 30. At the end of the day From between four and 4.30, we do some practice questions together as a group. So I'm walking folks through looking at a question. We had a previous video, remember, where we went through some of the questions with us, definitely, so let's check that out. Yeah, so there's a little plug for that. So we go through some of those questions. That's actually where I pulled those questions for you. We go through those and we talk about why is this correct answer, when did we talk about this topic, what are they asking, et cetera. So we unpack what those questions are. We do that for the last 30 minutes of each day doing some test prep. The content, though, runs from about 8.30 to 4.00 each day, and we generally, if we're moving at a good clip, we can usually finish about lunchtime on Friday. I've actually had some people go and sit for the exam on Friday afternoon while it's all fresh on their minds, but I usually tell folks I'm like, ooh, kind of wait till Monday, tuesday, let your brain cool down and let some of this stuff block in Good advice.

Chris Sienko: 8:49

Yeah, so what is the communication like in these boot camps you basically mentioned? Some people work from home, some people are in office or whatever, but pre-COVID especially, a lot of people thought of boot camp classes as something where everyone flew to a site and barricaded themselves in a hotel conference center and sweated it all out together. So, but these days boot camps are more flexible, with remote learning, and so I'm wondering how your classes managed to retain this type of communication during the class, when people are coming in from all these different places?

Tommy Gober: 9:19

That is a great question. So, yeah, we've got two different modalities that we do. Right, we do the face-to-face still. We still go and hold up in a hotel and everybody kind of parks it. There is still value in that. You might be like I don't wanna pay for my folks to go and sit through these boot camps face-to-face, but you know, what it does is it forces these folks to commit to learning. They're free of distractions. We're all there. I'm getting body language, I'm getting feedback from folks. It's a very, very rich learning environment. So I would say, first and foremost, the best boot camp would be the one that's face-to-face. Barring that, though, we can do online. The way that the online boot camps work. I'm here on screen, just like this, and folks are connected via Zoom Cameras off. We don't really wanna see somebody walk around their bathroom behind you or whatever. Right, right, and most folks are. We stay muted throughout the week so that there's free of distractions. We have people chewing Fritos in their microphone and stuff, so we stay muted that way, but come off of mute at any point, ask me questions, give a feedback, and so it becomes all about this kind of discourse. I didn't mention this on an earlier, chris, but my formal schooling is in education and there's an education theorist, jean-pierre Jaix, who said that learning happens in the discourse and it's in the exchange, the back and forth, that we've got where that happens. So, like I mentioned earlier, like if somebody's just sitting there idle, trying to passively learn this, it's not gonna happen for them. It's whenever you're coming off of mute asking questions, saying like oh, that's like this, that's like this, that's all I've seen this. You're helping others learn, you're learning that yourself, and so it becomes this very open, collaborative form of communication. A lot of times folks don't feel comfortable with coming off the mute, so they're just going to put their questions in chat. I keep an eye out for that too.

Chris Sienko: 11:18

So all loads. Do you get kind of like hubbub's of like students talking to each other through the Zoom as well, or is it all kind of focused toward you and then you sort of retract it back?

Tommy Gober: 11:28

Sometimes they're going back and forth, especially if there's, like a major sporting event going on during the week.

Chris Sienko: 11:35

Right Unrelated yeah.

Tommy Gober: 11:37

We get some back and forth there. We have a lot of service members that will come through, and so we get the interservice ribbing. That goes on back and forth. So there's a lot of fun banter that goes on. We generally everybody stays professional, though we keep moving ahead, but we have fun with it throughout the week. One of the things that actually really really enjoy about my job is that we come out every week. We have some kind of like inside joke, that kind of percolates up, yes, right. So at the end of the week we're all. We kind of have this gag, that, and I'm usually trying to find a way to like weave that back into the whatever we're talking about. So we have fun with it.

Chris Sienko: 12:12

Love it. So what is exam day like exactly you mentioned? Maybe waiting, you know, the weekend to sort of cool your brain down or whatever. But like, what does the boot camp do to help everyone take their running leap into the exam with a clear head? And once you've taken the exam, when do you find out how you did there if you passed?

Tommy Gober: 12:31

Oh, I can tackle that. One quick the. So you find out what the cut with the comp to your security plus exam before you even leave your seat. It tells you right there on the screen Congratulations, you passed. Okay, this is the. This is the score you needed, is what you got. Way to go. And when you go to to sit for the exam, if we're, if we're doing it like a, a live in person, you know we're taking over the hotel conference room. We at InfoSec, we do provide sit down testing services right there. So before your folks even leave the hotel, you know they're, they're getting, they're walking with that. But the the when you're going to sit for the exam. There's two different modalities you've got. You can do it online or you can do it in person at a test center somewhere. If you're in a major metro area, there's a test center near you. They're located at different training centers. There are private testing centers that are located around Pearson view run some test centers, and then community colleges, library systems for different counties will run that. Also, military installations literally around the world for service members that are deployed overseas can also test there at those. So on test day though, you know I tell folks, you know, just go in there and, you know, put your best foot forward. You've prepared for this, you're ready to go.

Chris Sienko: 14:01

Love it. So in considering taking a boot camp for certification exam study, Tommy, what advice or evidence can you give to listeners who are wondering if this is their best option?

Tommy Gober: 14:13

Like I said earlier, a lot of folks fool themselves and say I can study for my students. I don't have to get anybody's help. I can do this. You can. A lot of folks attempt and come up short. If you have experience in the field already, it can be beneficial to learn the vocabulary, the styles of questions that we've got and learning the CompTIA way of doing this. If you're doing this on your own, it commits you. When you're going to do a bootcamp, it commits you to this time of like. Here's the time that I've got skin in the game now. It's not like I'll get around doing this whenever I can. I'm going to put the book on the nightstand, I'll read it before I go to bed each night and then you end up.

Chris Sienko: 15:01

I'll take you to the night. It'll take me only 275 days.

Tommy Gober: 15:08

Yeah, a lot of folks have just done it. Happen for them. It locks you in. I have a structure that we go through. We do this all of our instructors. It's structured. We have a way to do it. It's a method to it. We have the success numbers to prove the method works, so we'll get you through it.

Chris Sienko: 15:25

Beautiful Tommy Gover. Thank you for this entertaining tour through your Security Plus Bootcamp. I'm thrilled we got to talk today, absolutely Thanks. Thank you all for watching this episode. If you enjoyed this video and felt it helped you, please share it with your colleagues, forums and other social media accounts and definitely subscribe to our podcast feed or our YouTube page. You can just type in CyberWork, infosec into any of them and you'll be well on your way. There's plenty more to come, including one more Security Plus episode with Tommy. So if you have any topics that you want us to cover, please drop them in the comments below and we do read those comments. Until then, see you next time and happy learning. See you, chris, see you, hey. If you're worried about choosing the right cybersecurity career, click here to see the 12th most in-demand cybersecurity roles. I ask experts working in the field how to get hired and how to do the work of these security roles so you can choose your study with confidence. I'll see you there.