I wanted to weigh in here. I am a lifelong IT guy and developer, and I worked at Acuitus from 2009-2013, leaving to take a job that would let me move near my kids post-divorce. During that time span, I wrote content for the tutoring system, ran the school we conducted for the US Navy's basic IT rating, and helped start up the school we ran in Palo Alto for the US Veterans' Administration. I have no financial interest in the company but still have friends who work there. My background also includes stints teaching the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program at Microsoft, teaching for Global Knowledge, and running training workshops for Microsoft on Office deployment, Windows desktop deployment, and various parts of Office 365. I mention all this to help explain where I'm coming from. That's disclaimer #1. (I used my real name for this post so you're welcome to Google me, look me up on LinkedIn, etc.)
Disclaimer #2: I have no idea what tuition or financial arrangements Acuitus makes with current students. With that said, this isn't an internship; students don't work for Acuitus at any time during the process, although I know some prior students were hired as classroom instructors and sysadmins.
With that said, let me talk about the training program itself. The program is based on 4 types of instruction:
- computer-based instruction. I'll talk more about the platform Acuitus has developed for this. It's pretty damn amazing.
- Live instruction, intended to be a sort of study hall-- students learn new stuff from the tutoring software, then go to study hall to have that knowledge supplemented and their questions answered.
- Labs, where the tutor actively guides students through a set of objectives using Socratic questioning and natural language. For example, in the Microsoft Exchange labs I wrote, students would be guided through tasks like moving transaction logs or databases to a new volume or starting and stopping message queues. Think of this like standing next to your little brother and telling him how to scramble eggs and make toast.
- Exercises, which are scenario-based break/fix evolutions where the tutor can offer Socratic help but only on request. Think of this like going to sit on the sofa to play Xbox while your little brother makes you eggs and toast: you can help him if he needs it but you're not proactively helping.
When the program started, we had human experts teach live, then used the transcripts of their teaching and interaction with students to build the first set of tutoring. Without going into all the details, the tutoring engine uses some PFM to teach and watch the student's learning state. Labs and exercises are run on a set of VMs (for Windows and Linux) or simulators (for Cisco IOS) where there are essentially rootkits-- so the system sees every click or keystroke from the student. This enables really fine-grained help-- when the student gets stuck and clicks the "call tutor" button, the tutor can infer exactly what the student knows or is struggling with by analyzing what they've done. For example, if the exercise requires the student to rebuild a RAID array, and she hasn't opened the Disk Management console in Windows, the next question the tutor asks will be different than if it sees that she's opened Disk Management and made a change to the volume properties.
The curriculum starts with the very most basics: what's a CPU, what are the typical parts of PC hardware, binary and hex notation, etc. But very quickly it builds into basic networking (subnetting, ISO layers, ARP, DHCP, DNS, TCP/IP, and so on) then into Windows desktop admin, then Windows server, then Cisco IOS. By the time students come out they have practical experience identifying and fixing live problems in a realistic simulated environment.
In addition to all this stuff, there's human-led soft-skills coaching for interviewing, resume prep, etc. This is important because a big part of the program is the placement assistance. When I was working there, our graduating class from the VA school went to GM, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and a host of smaller companies. It does Acuitus no good to put people through the training unless they get jobs and can pay. Keep that in mind.
Is $35K expensive? Yes. I'm not going to try to argue that. Is it worth it? That's a decision that each individual student has to make. I will point out that the Acuitus approach offered enough provable benefits that DARPA spent a bunch of money extending it, the Navy adopted it for training their IT technicians, and the VA successfully used it to train and upskill a ton of under- or unemployed veterans.
So, on to a few of the points raised upthread:
- yes, for-profit schools have a bad reputation in a lot of quarters, mostly deservedly.
- no, Acuitus isn't a scam or an unpaid internship
- the company's been around since 1999. They have a serious track record.
- yes, the Acuitus program combines hands-on and classroom instruction in realistic environments, not just plinking about with VMs
- yes, Acuitus offers placement assistance
- no, this is not the typical "coding bootcamp" (which teach you about as much coding skill as assembling an IKEA desk will teach you about carpentry)
- no, the fact that you have to apply for this school isn't unusual-- in the VA school we found that a percentage of applicants just didn't have the background or intellectual horsepower to do well in the school. In the typical for-profit model, you let in anyone who can pay because all you care about is the money; in this model (and many other similar programs), you want people to graduate and succeed so it pays to be more selective about who you admit.
Phew. That's probably enough. To anyone who made it this far, congrats!
