Casper Certifiations

[jramsey021]

This may be a fruitless question, but for those of us that work for businesses or schools that cannot afford to spend $2,500 to send each employee to a class to get certified are there any other options for us to pursue a CCT/CCA/CCE certification path that might be more... accessible?

[Sandy]

If you have enough people who want training/certifications, a training pass would be the way to go.

[jramsey021]

The training pass is even more out of our budget. We're a small school district that manages roughly 300 iOS devices and potentially ~75 macOS devices.

[jgwatson]

I have a Feature Request for Jamf to offer online training for people and organizations like us. Heck, if you can get an online degree now, this is a no-brainer.

https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/feature-requests/4352/casper-certified-training-made-available-online

[JKingsnorth]

I'm in the same boat. I manage our JAMF for the School District I work for and not only is it expensive, its never hosted anywhere close to us.

The closest place is Chicago but it's very hard for me to be able to get away for more than a couple days, we have 3 schools, 1500+ students, over 1000 devices used on a daily basis and only 2 people in our Dept. When I'm gone for 2-3 days its crazy coming back.

I really wish technology companies would start to embrace distance learning more.

[jramsey021]

It would be nice. I don't think there is a Casper Certified person in our state as far as the education system goes. Perhaps someone with a private company but there is not much of a business boom as far as technology goes in West Virginia so probably not. But on top of the cost of the course it would be outrageous to expect our dwindling budgets to have room for the cost of travel and hotel accommodations since there are no classes offered within even 4 hours of me.

I agree with you that we do the online Jump Start program. There should be an online training program and maybe even include a certification for one person with the initial Jump Start costs. I'm sure there are tons of things that Jamf can do but I'm not afforded the time to go out and research and test procedures and the certification training costs prevent that from ever happening.

[blackholemac]

I'm gonna give a +1 to the training pass despite the cost. We too are a k-12 with limited funds...Here's why our department went for it...up until recently, we had only myself with a background on anything Apple related. With the $10,000 up front cost my boss is going to get four other folks trained to the CCA level and pay for me to renew my CCE and CJA. It was a very tough sell to my boss, but he saw the inherent value of not having to hire anyone new by leveraging existing staff. I'm willing to talk about how I convinced him in more detail if you like. Jamf's classes will have you ready to hit the ground running.

[JKingsnorth]

Maybe there needs to be an Educator Certification because it seems like all the issues that relate back to this are from K-12.

A lot of the times there are courses for IT Depts where the focus is on Business', Health Care Industry, Government and Education and frankly sometimes a lot of the stuff taught in those classes never applies to the Education field. Example: People are in the mind set that everyone has their own computer from work or a small number of people share a couple of computers. However in education you can have up to 100 different users use the same computer in 1 day.

Just my $0.02.

And a Training Pass isn't always the best choice. At $10,000 and me being the only one taking the classes we'd lose $2,500 but there is no way they'd spend $7,500 on classes plus travel and lodging added to that. It's just not feasible in K-12 environments today.

[Sandy]

I find it ironic when K12 administration balk at paying for training for their tech dept when their whole entire premise is lifelong learning and the value of continuing education. Qualified techs touch everything in a school district!
We are K-12 and have a training pass. Besides myself we have 2 other techs with CCTs (and another two who moved to other jobs). Even those who did not quite pass learned a LOT. We have one this week at OS X training, and one going for his CCA soon, and two more currently registered for CCT. This is an amazing benefit to our techs.
For myself, it is an nice way to get away from the day to day and focus 100% on the product and new features. I try to go every couple years, since this is the only training available to me.
Of course we are extremely lucky to be in the Minneapolis area where courses are available!

[blackholemac]

Training pass was a tough sell but it was what we needed for our district. I appreciate it may not be the cookie-cutter answer for everyone. Everything used to fall to me, as "the Apple guy", but with this I'm able to have more peaceful vacations. Basically we scraped together the money through a deferred project and other such line items. Having additional techs with an updated skill set ends up paying for itself in a year's time just by reducing the amount of trouble tickets that get tier 2 level troubleshooting. It also keeps the techs continually learning. Definitely would support some tweaking to the training pass program but in general for us was a good investment.

[adamcodega]

Just to be clear, the training pass is a product available per person or per organization. It's valid for one year and you can take as many classes as you want that year for just the price of the training pass. Not including travel etc of course.

Individual pass is $4500, so if you take your CCT and your CCA you've already saved $500, maybe you'll have time for your CJA or CCE too.

Organization pass is $9500 for as many people from your organization who want to take training classes. With the one caveat that only one person can be taking a class at a time.

[blackholemac]

I forgot about the individual pass, that can help too if just one of you is getting certified. I've heard of some departments that get training grants for professional development on k-12 as well.

[jramsey021]

Any idea where we might find some of these grants that aren't teacher specific? I see quite a bit at a quick glance but all seem to be focused on teachers and the classroom rather than technology department employees.

[blackholemac]

I would love to find them myself. I based that anecdote on talking to someone at JNUC this year. He was able to get a professional development grant for his K-12 to attend. If someone can get a grant for JNUC, there's gotta be a grant for professional development.

[millersc]

@blackholemac if you can find grant information on PD for JNUC or even the Training Pass, please pass it along. Please :)