King of Your Certification Castle

When Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000, he decided that the players would be more motivated and provide better results if they had more perks. When the team drafted Etan Thomas, Dan Langhi and Pete Mickeal in the 2000 NBA Draft, Cuban flew them to Dallas in his $40 million private jet. Cuban famously upgraded his players' locker room, installing a flat-screen TV, Sony PlayStation and DVD player in every locker. Utah Jazz radio announcer David Locke called the Dallas locker room the "Taj Mahal of locker rooms." During the 2011 NBA lockout, Mavs guard Delonte West actually slept there at night.

Did all of that extravagance and luxury make the players better at their jobs? Maybe. The Mavericks did overcome long odds to win an NBA championship in 2011. And Cuban's approach certainly has given numerous sports reporters (and IT certification bloggers) something to write about. It also reflects some of the same thinking that led Fireband Training to recently create a luxury training and certification experience. As described in the January issue of Certification Magazine, Firebrand, based in the United Kingdom, offers a five-star training package for select cybersecurity certifications that begins with a helicopter ride to a castle in Scotland.

Before you "get to the choppah," as Arnold Schwarzenegger might advise, however, you should of course consider the price tag: That level of luxury will set you back more than 250 Gs. And is sleeping in a Scottish castle and eating meals prepared by a personal chef really going to help you certify? I mean, anyone is likely to enjoy a first-rate vacation. But your goal as an IT professional is merely to study, learn and get certified, and you don't get anything extra for picking up some style points along the way.

TestOut Continuing Education has a much better deal for you. Pick any of our training packages, subscribe for only as long you actually need the training, and then plug in at home (or even at work, or school — anywhere that you can connect to the internet) and get certified whenever it's convenient for you to do so. You can sleep in your own bed at night and take a break whenever you like. TestOut CE's LabSim training is the best you can find, and that, after all, is the most important thing to get right. You don't need to pay for a castle (and a helicopter) to have a world-class training experience.

Besides, with all the money you'll save, you can take a real vacation — maybe even to a castle in Scotland — where you don't have to study the whole time.