I'm an ex-Computeach student and am somewhat shocked and saddened by some of the posts on this forum. I was just googling to see if by chance there was a Computeach course on the cheap covering Visual Basic and I happened to hit upon this thread and the curiosity got the better of me. I can of course only speak of my personal experience and that of an ex-colleague of mine. Being made redundant from the Civil Service I looked into the possibility of studying computer programming as I had basic experience of programming in QBasic and was genuinely interested in the subject. I phoned up, got the literature and sales material a few days later, but no clue as the actual cost. I knew it wouldn't be cheap, so I arranged for one of their 'advisors' to pop round. The first chap they sent round was a salesman and a bit pushy, so I just left it as "I'll think about it". After a few weeks I had further questions and I wanted someone to come round and answer my queries, but I did point out, not the chap who came to see me previously as I found him pushy. The second person to come round to see me was someone who had just passed his exams and had started a new job a few months ago and was doing this to help pay his fees off quicker. I could relate to him and he did point out that if you can't commit to 15 hours per week every week, then Computeach isn't for you. I eventually took a gamble and enrolled on the COBOL course at a cost of about £1800. This was back in 1997. I set aside 2 evenings a week and either Saturday or Sunday morning, supplemented by 2 or 3 dinner-time, 1 hour revision sessions or re-reading sessions of what I had learned the night before. I soon got into the regular habit of allotted timeframes for my studying and although at times it was very difficult to maintain, I forced myself to do it and had the support from my wife and family. I would study alone in the spare bedroom with no distractions like TV or other people talking. Within 9 months I passed my first exam, a Pascal programming course. Next came the main event, the COBOL course, which took much longer, but with extra effort in the preceding months leading upto the exam, I passed first time my City & Guilds 424 in COBOL Applications Programming with a credit. The next task was to get a job in programming. I do agree that the Computeach Careers Advice is rubbish. They didn't even find one vacancy for me to apply for in about 4 months. They updated my CV but that was about it. I had better look applying for junior programming vacancies in Computer Weekly. This was early 1999 and year 2000 was the big thing and two agencies went out of their way to get me interview (Computer Futures and Hays IT). Eventually in Feb 1999 I had 3 interviews in about 2 days and got offered 2 of the jobs. It ended up that 2 companies were bidding for my services and ended up as junior year 2000 programmer with Micro Focus on a salary of £18,000 which increased to £22000 after 6 months on billable projects. MF took on a number of juniors like myself who had qualified through Computeach. I'm no longer a programmer/developer, but still work in IT as System Test Analyst with a salary of £34,000 plus bonuses (if we're lucky). There are plenty of testing jobs about, in fact my company have struggled to recruit testers, because there has been a lack of skilled people with enthusiasm. The money and effort I spent on the training has without question been worth every penny and every minute. I believe if you are willing to put the effort in and not give up, you will get there and land a decent job, but if you have the attitude of "I won't study this week, I'll pick it up again next week" then you won't succeed. How many people fall into the latter category? So I have to ask all of you who say you have been mis-sold a course, weren't informed of the total cost and the interest, have you really given your studying 100% effort? did you not read and understand what the total cost would be? did you not understand what effort would be required EVERY week in order to succeed? I was clearly told that I would need to commit to a minimum of 10-12 hours per week otherwise it wouldn't be worth it. As for loans from Barclays, at 29% p.a why didn't you take out a personal loan? - far cheaper and I ended up with a rate of about 7% My study material was very good indeed, no complaints there. Sometimes my marked code might take longer to be returned back to me, but that was only here and there. I also felt they could have moved into online courses, marking and submission of work much sooner (brought in after I finished apparently). I'd be interested to know in what ways do some of you think that you have been 'mis-sold' a course, since nobody forced me to sign up for the COBOL course.