Springboard

I enrolled in the Springboard Cybersecurity bootcamp. Its a great course for those with either a lot of time or some technical experience. I STRONGLY suggest doing a free months of self study or a free online beginners course such as Udemy or Coursera. This bootcamp is a no joke program and not for the faint of heart. You really do have to set your mind and schedule to invest 20-25 hours a week. I really enjoyed the labs and the projects which gave you real scenarios to deal with. You get what you put in. I wasn't a fan of the LinkedIn Learning as its a lot to take in for a short period of time but if you know going in that's it's going to take real dedication anything is possible. Just do some research and self study first. 

The program is impressively structured, indicating that it has been well-established over a significant period. It is designed for self-paced learning and Springboard offers an easy-to-understand teaching approach. The team is always willing to assist you, ensuring that you will never be stranded. The mentorship program is an excellent feature of the program. Engaging with an experienced professional in your field of study is an ideal way to learn more about the practical aspects of the profession.

I'd recommend Springboard because of its unwavering support throughout my journey. 

I had zero experience in UX/UI design when first started, and almost a year later, I feel confident in having learned the fundamentals of great product design. My mentor, Daria, played a huge role in my growth as a designer and gave honest feedback on my portfolio. 

They have career coaches that will give you great tips for networking and salary negotiation when it comes time to find a job.  I felt fully supported by the Springboard community, and the support center is quick in answering emails (all my emails/questions were answered in less than 24 hours). 

Springboard went beyond expectations by providing excellent starting points for design principles. I think the more effort you invest, the greater the rewards. It's an ideal choice for beginners seeking to pivot into the UX/UI design field. 

I have positive experience taking this course. I just completed it and have not found a job yet, but i have learn a lot. It took me a year to complete the program due to my schedule and personal matters. Springboard is very flexible and allowed me to take some breaks and extend the program so I could finish it. 

I had a weekly call with a mentor that Springboard matched for me and she was amazing. She was the big part of me being able to complete the program. I am really grateful for her.

A lot of articles and reading materials were outdated though. But I find their assignments reasonable and helpful.

Overall, I recommend Springboard UX/UI career track. 

I had a great time in the springboard program.  I came into it being a self-taught programmer that wanted a stronger foundation for my skills and a certification to open up career opportunities.  Springboard's software engineering  career track gave me projects and lessons that really taught me the fundamentals of software engineering pretty comprehensively.   The projects all built upon the lessons that came before, so while they were really challenging and great for my portfolio, I was able to follow them well enough and complete them.  The two capstone projects are where I really leveled up.  Capstone projects are your major projects that you build all on your own.  I learned a ton and had a great time building my own full-stack apps from scratch.  I had a lot of personal things going on throughout the program, so I would fall behind a lot with my projects, my mentor was great at helping keep the important things like completing the program in perspective.  Which was hugely motivating.  The one area where I didn't really get the full benefit from was the career services.  The coach they gave me was great and they helped me develop my career persona/portfolio.  However when it came to the actual job search, I was pretty much on my own and the market may be hot but it is still very difficult getting a job.  Not getting an interview...getting the job.  My career advice for after the program is to make sure you have at least one star project you can speak to that highlights all your skills.  Even better if you can show off the project in action in some way.  Those things are what landed me my current two positions.  As a freelance developer and coding mentor at the apple academy.

I have completed the Springboard Cybersecurity bootcamp and gotten my CompTIA Security + certification. I was part of the March 2022 cohort and completed my bootcamp on October 16 2022.  I completed my Job Guarantee period (6 months) without receiving any offers and got a full refund from the program.


Executive Summary:


I would NOT recommend this bootcamp to anyone.


After not being able to get a Cybersecurity job myt Career coach advised me to look at Help Desk potions. The bootcamp does not give you the skills required by help desk positions. (Also, I did not take a Cybersecurity bootcamp so that I could work at a help desk.)


The material you are given is not unique to Springboard.  The technical material is LinkedIn learning videos that can be accessed for $30 a month with a LinkedIn Premium membership. 


The instructions for the mini-projects are vague and incomplete.


The mentors are not well screened.  I was ghosted by 2 mentors in my first week. It also seems like they are also not given all the material necessary to properly help students through the course. 


I do not believe that the material presented in this bootcamp alone would prepare you to take and pass the CompTIA Security plus exam.


About me:


I have a bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly SLO.  I have worked at Lockheed Martin for almost 7 years as a Systems Engineer.  I worked as a Customer Support Engineer for Orbotech for 6 months.   I have been a stay at home dad since 7/2015.  During that time I also completed the Intro to Programming Nanodegree from Udacity.


Decision to join Springboard:


I made the decision to take the Springboard bootcamp because on previous attempts to get back into the work force employers saw my career gap as a negative.  I wanted to put something recent on my resume and show employers that I was still able to work/learn. I had been reading a lot in the news about cyber attacks and how they had become more frequent and how there was a shortage of cybersecurity professionals.  Cybersecurity seemed like a good area to go into since already had a technical background.  I thought taking the bootcamp and getting my CompTIA Security + certificate would allow to get a job without having to go back to square one in my career, like going back to taking a help desk job.


To join the boot camp I did an intake interview. During the interview I talked to an admission person and explained to him why was joining the bootcamp. He talked to me about the program and what to expect. 


The main reasons for choosing the springboard bootcamp over other bootcamps were:


Its significantly cheaper than other bootcamps.


Offers a job guarantee.  If I don’t get a job in 6 months after completing I get my money back. None of the other boptcamps I looked at had this.


One on One mentorship.


Was suppose to be focused more on blue team (defense) then red team (hacking).


It was done through Self paced online learning.


Job hunting after the bootcamp:


I will get back to the bootcamp in just a minute.  


After completing the bootcamp successfully and getting my CompTIA Security plus certificate I started the job hunting process around 10/16/2022. After 6 months and applying to over 140 jobs (some were more EE oriented but the vast majority were cybersecurity) I have had no offers.  I have had multyiple interviews with recruiters and a few interviews with hiring managers but.  The reason for this seems to be that the industry believes that Cybersecurity is not an entry level job.  In order to get an “entry level” job in cybersecurity you need years of experience in IT. This is what is being told to me by recruiters, cyber security professionals that I talk to, and is being said all over LinkedIn posts. 


I talked to my career counselor about this and she suggested I start looking at IT support roles or Help desk positions and that I should my salary expectations 50-60K a year.  When I looked at Help desk positions the pay is closer to 40K a year with no benefits.  So I tried applying for IT roles and I got one interview.  During the interview the person told me I was not what they were looking for, they wanted someone with more IT experience and that IT was not an entry level position.  The skills they are looking for were windows troubleshooting, macOS troubleshooting, linux troubleshooting, what to do if one computer on your network can not see a network printer but all the other can.  These are not skills covered in the Springboard Cybersecurity Bootcamp.  


After I talked to my Career counselor I talked to a Senior Career Service Manager about my experience. \  The Manager also tried to say that the change could be due to the changing job market.  But I talked to someone else (the week of 1/16/2023) that just did her intake interview and she was also told that she would be able to get a Cybersecurity Engineering position.  This person was told that IT positions and Help desk positions were not qualifying positions for the job guarantee and therefore she would not be advised to apply to these roles. This is the exact opposite of what I am experiencing in the job search.  The manager also told me that perhaps the person doing my intake interview did not understand that I was making a career transition which would affect my earning potential.  However I talked to another springboard student who was transition from being a hairdresser to cybersecurity and she was also told that she would be able to earn between 90-130K after the bootcamp. So while the manager tried to give me lots of different reasons for why the information given to me during the intake interview did not match what I am experiencing during the job hunt, none of them really held any water.


I have also not seen any materialization of these “industry partnerships” that were discussed during both the intake interview and the course.  They have a partnership with a job board “Power to Fly” but when I look for cybersecurity jobs there I find nothing.  And also, it is just another job board, nothing really special about it.  I filled out Springboards “Employer Partnership On boarding Form”, have not heard anything from that. I get a monthly newsletter about jobs and the last one had 1 cybersecurity job listed on it, but like the ones I find myself it required years of experience.  I asked the Senior Manager of the Careers department about this.  She told me that it’s been really hard and slow to develop industry partnerships within cybersecurity.  Well if they have not been able to build these industry partnerships then they should not be advertising them during the intake interview or the course work. 


I also talked with another Senior Manager at Career Services and the conversation went pretty much the same. I also talked with a Senior Director of Admissions at Springboard.  He semed to loisted to me more then the previous people.  He said he would take my feedback and share it with his team but no immediate help for me.   


The boot camp:


The Point system and Time estimates:


Since the bootcamp is self paced all the material is done via online videos.  Almost all the videos are LinkedIn learning videos.  You can get access to LinkedIn learning for $30 a month.  For sixth months (the amount of time the bootcamp is suppose to take) that would be $180.  If you pay for the bootcamp all up front, one of the cheapest ways if not the cheapest way, its $9900. Springboard does not provide extra notes, or enrichment material for these videos.  It’s just a link that takes you to LinkedIn and plays the video. 


The boot camp assigns point to all the assignments that you are suppose to complete.  In order to finish the bootcamp in 6 months they recommend you complete about 400 point a week. They advertise that this should take 13-20 hours a week.   I talked to several students who were enrolled at the same time as me and none of them finished in six months. I also took longer than six months to complete. 


The problem with this is that there time estimates that are shown per video are wrong.  For example in Section 5.1 they say the time is between 3 hours 15 minutes and 4.5 hours.  This broken down into 2 hours 55 minutes to 4 hours to watch the course and 20-30 minutes to take notes.  The total runtime of the video is 3 hours and 20 minutes.  How do you watch a 3 hour 20 minute video in 2 hours and 55 minutes?  If the total runtime of the video is 3 hours 20 minutes then the minimum amount of time for the exercise should be 3 hours 20 minutes. This section is even worse because there were multiple exercises, quizzes, a test, and extra documentation to read with this video.  If you do all of the exercises in the video and the quizzes and the test I would estimate this section taking 8.5 hours.


I remember there was another section where springboards max time estimate was 30 mins short of the runtime of the LinkedIn learning video.  Almost all the sections have this problem, where the minimum time that springboard estimates is less than the run time of the video.  Most are only 5-10 minutes but it starts to add up over the course of the entire bootcamp.  And these times are how they calculate the points for each video and therefore effects the time it takes to get your 400 points per week.  


When you gain access to springboards course there will be a timeline shown and it will break down which sections you should be completing each week.  But this timeline does not align with the 400 points per week.  There was one week where the timeline said I should only complete 230points.  These might not seem like major errors but when you pay $9900 for a course I would expect it to not have this many simple errors, I mean how hard it to make sure the time listed on your course matches the time given by LinkedIn?


Mini Projects:


Another element to the course is what they call “mini-projects”.  These mini-projects can be anything from reading an article and answering a coupled of questions about it to writing a script in python or pearl.  Often times the instructions to these mini-projects were ambiguous.  Here is some feedback I gave to Springboard about Mini Project 8 and 9:


In the video Project Management Foundations the presenter kept saying we would get all the specific information that we would need for the documentation from the Key Stake holders.  So obviously we do not have actual stake holders we can sit down with and pick their brains for information.  So I would have expected to have more details about the project in information pack given.  But no, the information given was very limited.  For example, mini project 8 the project was to “install wifi” for a hair salon.  Well the first question is, what does “install wifi” mean.  Does it mean just install a wifi router, does she need an ISP with wifi, does she want the “social wifi” talked about in the links provided in the document?  I decided to go with the most literal interpretation which is to install a wifi router.  This however seems to make the project ridiculously simple and not worth the effort of going through project management process.  I mean in the real world her ISP would probably provide her with a wifi router as part of her monthly subscription, mine does.  So maybe more realistic project would be better. I see it says that some of the information was left out on purpose to make exercise what we learned but the project definition should not be some of the information that is left out.


Mini-project 9 suffers from some of the same problems as mini-project 8.  Lack of definition, lack of information that would come form the stake holders.  But there is more, the information in the packet provided is contradictory.  In the objectives it says you want to deploy Windows 10 by January 2020 but then in the timeline you don’t even start work tell second quarter 2021. Also the roadmap delivery timeline indicates that work will go from Q2 2021 to Q1 2022, so less then a year.  But in the Phase one Recommendations you have a task that is going to take 800-1600 days (2.2-4.4 years), so how do those work out?  In the videos we watched it indicated that when you had problems like these you went to your stake holders and talked about it and got clarification or came up with a solution, but we have no stake holders to go to.  I looked for help on slack and what I found was “make it up to fit”.  That’s what I did and it work but if you are giving us a project to learn project management why make it more difficult and frustrating by not providing all the information or providing contradictory information?  Why not give us clear information so we can understand what we are doing better and get a better experience?


In another mini-project we are suppose to write a Pearl script. Just before the project there is video go over how to write scripts in Pearl.  Just so you know, the bootcamp says you do not need any previous coding experience to complete the bootcamp.  The video goes over how to download pearl to your computer and set up your Integrated development environment (IDE).  Since I know I will need to write a pearl script after watching the video I try and follow the steps in the video.  However the steps in the video do not work because the websites referenced in the video have changed (the video is from 2016).  I go to the springboard slack channel and find other students have had the same problem and they have posted a work around.  A representative form springboard responded to posts about the problem (they did not give a solution) and the solutions the students posted.  These posts were already 6 months old at the time.  This means Springboard new about the problem, knew what the solution was, and yet did not update the course material for at least six months. All they had to do was write up the steps given in slack into a document and post the document under this section on the website.  For a competent web designer this should have only taken a few hours at most. 


In another mini-project they asked us to setup a phishing campaign using the GoPish software. This was one part of mini-project and the total time for the mini-project was estimated to be around 4 hours I believe.  There were several problems for this mini-project.  They did not provide us with detailed instructions on how to make GoPish work; just the tutorial the website provides which is not great. I was not able to get it to work properly but submitted the steps that I believed would make it work. When I talked to my mentor about it he said that the first time he used GoPhish it took him several days to get it to work properly. How can springboard expect students who are not cyber security experts to make this work in a couple hours when it takes experienced Cybersecurity personal a couple days to get it setup right?


I have previously provided this feedback to Springbaord and the response I get is them saying that they have flagged the feedback for review and are considering making changes.  I also remember reading on the slack a Springboard representative saying they leave the instructions somewhat ambiguous on purpose to allow the students to figure out their own solutions. But if you read what the students are posting on the Slack channel what is actually happening is that the students are being confused and getting frustrated by the lack of clear direction. 


Labs:


Part of the Springboard course is doing labs.  For these labs they have contracted with a company called Infosec learning. You log into the webpage and its sets up a virtual environment for you to conduct your lab. The main problem I have with these labs are that the instructions are so dumbed down that you do not have to think to complete the lab and therefore I think the information retention form them is minimal.   For example the instructions don’t say “close the window” they say “close the window by clicking on the red x in the upper right hand corner.”  They don’t say “search for term xyz” they say “Type xyz into the search field and then use the cursor to click on the arrow at the right of the search field to conduct the search”.  Those might not be the exact instruction they give but you get the idea. This is how you give instructions to people who are not familiar with the basics of using a computer not to people who are taking an online bootcamp.  This might seem minor but if you are familiar with how to use computers and have to slog through reading pages of instruction like this it becomes boring and detracts from the learning experience. 


Mentors:


Part of the Springboard bootcamp is that you have 1 on 1 meetings with a mentor every week.  The mentors are people who work in the industry and are supposed to answer your questions about the course material or the projects or just about the industry in general.   When I joined I was setup to have my first mentor meeting on Wednesday of the first week.  The mentor did not show for the meeting. I let Springboard know, they set me up with a second mentor for Friday. The second mentor did not show. I was then set up with a third mentor who did show up to the meeting.  I never found out why the first two mentors did not show.  I went on the Springboard Slack channel and asked if other people were having this problem.  While no one else had two mentors ghost them, I do remember people saying that they had mentors show up late, were in rush to leave, or just did not seem that good at explaining cybersecurity.  It seems like Springboard needs to revise their screening for their mentors.  


Another feature of the Bootcamp is On demand mentors. If you have a question in between your regularly scheduled mentor meetings you can schedule a meeting with an on demand mentor.  I had a problem with one of the mini-projects because the instructions were incomplete so I scheduled an on demand mentor.  The problem I was having was I did not understand what value they wanted me to put in a column of a spreadsheet. I asked my on demand mentor what I was suppose to put in this column and his answer was something like “That’s a good question, I don’t know.”  How can he not know, part of his job is to help students with projects.  If he had students assigned to him he would be grading these projects.  Shouldn’t Springboard have given him templates of what the finished projects look like so he knows how to grade them and answer these questions? 


Another thing that I saw was mentors on the same slack channel as the students, asking for guidance or examples on how to grade the mini-projects because they did not know the answers.  I would think there would be some kind of on boarding for the mentors where springboard takes them through the mini-projects and what is expected in each one.  Or at the very least would provide them with examples to compare to.   I would also think the mentors should have their own slack channel so that they can communicate without the students seeing it.  After all you don’t want them answering each other question and showing the answer to the students on the slack channel.


Capstone Project:


The capstone project for the bootcamp is writing a report of a pretend penetration test.  It is broken up into 5 parts and each part you write out what you would do at each stage of the penetration test.  The final stage is to write a report summarizing your supposed finding of the penetration test and what measures should be taken.   I find this capstone project very unsatisfying for the columniation of this bootcamp for a couple of reasons.


1.       This bootcamp was supposed to be focused on blue team (defense.). So why is the capstone project, the project I am suppose to use to help sell myself to potential employers, focused on a red team (hacker) activity. I understand the theory that to be a good blue team member you must understand the red team but I think  there are many projects they could have done that would have focused on the blue team aspect better.2.      The final Project is writing a report on inputs that they gave us. I think it would be much better to have something more technical then just write a report.  They could setup a more complex lab for us to do and then write a report explain the results.  Have us configure a firewall, have us setup VPN, have us analyze prepackaged data for signs of a breach and then write a report with our findings.  In other words instead of giving us the findings and having us write the report give us the data, then have us analyze it and come up with our own findings.


Preparation for Taking the CompTIA Security + exam.


The part of the bootcamp where you are suppose to study, take practice test and quizzes and then take the Actual exam and upload your scores, is worth 16 points or a maximum of 54 minutes according to their time estimates.   Actually taking and passing the exam is not given any points or any time estimate.  To me taking and passing the exam is the point of the bootcamp and yet they do not allocate any time or points to doing it.  Also they allocate 30 minutes to taking the practice exams and quizzes.  Not 30 mins each, a total of 30 minutes.  For me Studying and taking the practice exams and quizzes to prepare for the test took several weeks.  Why does Springboard not indicate the time this will take better so that students have a more realistic idea of how long it will take to complete the course? 


When you get ready to prepare for the test Springboard sends you a list of resources outside the bootcamp to use to help prepare you for the test. It is not required to use these resources but it seem odd that they would suggest you use resources outside the bootcamp to prepare for the test if the bootcamp is supposed to prepare you for the test.  Why not include these resources in the bootcamp. It seems like a lot of students, including myself, find it necessary to use outside resources to prepare for the test.  That should not be the case if this bootcamp were truly preparing you for the test.


Burnout


All the other students I have talked to who were enrolled in the bootcamp at the same time as me, as well as myself get burned out on the material. This is because you are sitting at your computer for hours a day watching LinkedIn learning videos. While the bootcamp does offer you break and pause options taking these will of course lengthen the amount of time you are in the bootcamp.  And at least for me, it was only a temporary relief from the burn out, because as soon as you are back its back to sitting at your computer watching hours of videos.