The Hacker Academy and Certifications

May 11, 2010

We’re getting a lot of questions about certifications. Of course, when you launch a security training community, you hear a lot about certs. And everyone expects that The Hacker Academy will be preparing them for one cert or another.

And it will. But not because that’s our goal.

When we started designing the curriculum, Aaron and I had a long discussion about which certifications were the best and who we should partner with to bring curriculum to the table.

It was the most frustrating conversation of my life. All the certs had some good things you could say about their curriculum, but none of them were complete enough. They were all missing some pieces. Or they were using old material in some (and in some cases, many) areas.

So we decided that THA would be based on a superset of ALL the certifications. We took the curriculum lists of each of the five main certifications in penetration testing / ethical hacking, and created a course based on that. And then we added in content in areas that we felt were lacking.

We decided that we wanted to prepare students to be great penetration testers first, and certified second. Knowing, of course, that if you get the skills down, you’ll be able to pass whatever certification test you want.  If you have any questions about specific certifications that currently exist, we would be more than happy to give you our opinion…just ask.

We take the mindset that “becoming great” and “becoming certified” are only mutually exclusive in one direction – if you focus on the first, you’ll achieve the second easily. While if we focus on the second, you probably won’t achieve the first. We believe that the certification at the end should reflect the fact that you are a true master of your craft, not just that you know how to tackle certain specific problems.

And we refuse to allow our members to approach it any other way. We want you to achieve excellence.

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