I Did Two Years For My Degree. Guys I Worked With Got Certified On Their Phone For $10.

Let me put the main thing up top, because I would rather you hear it from me than get three hundred words deep and feel some kind of way about it.

I have never used SkillCat. Not one time. No free trial, no lesson, no practice test, no exam. I am not about to tell you how the app feels in your hand, because I do not know. I have no deal with them, no code, no kickback, nothing. If that changes I will say so on this same page in plain words.

What I do have is two things, and they are the only two worth anything when somebody starts talking to you about online trade certifications. I watched this happen to people I worked next to. And before I opened my mouth in public I went and read the whole thing properly, including the parts they do not put on the front page. That is what you are about to get. Not a review. A report.

Say it again: I have never used it

I am going to repeat that through this whole piece and I want you to notice me doing it, because the internet is full of people who found out about a thing on Tuesday and was an expert on Wednesday. That ain’t me and I ain’t finna start.

Here is the honest shape of what I know. I know what the company publishes. I know what it costs because I read the price off their own page. I know who it is approved by because I went and checked that separately instead of taking their word. And I know what happened to men I stood next to, which is the part that made me write this at all.

Everything past that is me telling you where to go look for yourself. Good enough? Good. Let’s get into it.

The part that got under my skin

I know guys I have worked with who used this. I am not putting a single name in this post and do not ask me for one. But I watched it happen more than once, and the speed of it did something to my chest.

They got certified and they got in. Quick. So quick it did not make no sense to me. One minute a man is asking questions, next minute he is holding the piece of paper that gets him through the door, and he is working. I remember thinking, straight up, y’all cheated the whole game.

That was my first reaction and I am telling you about it because it was wrong, and the way it was wrong is the whole lesson.

Nobody cheated nothing. There was a door standing open the whole time and they walked through it while the rest of us was still looking for the long hallway, because the long hallway is what we got taught. That is not them being slick. That is them paying attention.

And here is the part I had to sit with. Being annoyed that somebody found a shorter road is just pride wearing a work shirt. The job does not care how long your road was. The job cares whether you can do the work and whether you got the paper that says you are allowed to.

What I paid, and what I walked out with

I did a four year degree compressed into two years. Compressed is the right word for it. Same material, half the calendar, and every bit of that time came out of my life. What it put me at, when all of it was said and done, is the associate’s level.

So I got mine. I earned it and nobody can take it. But run my paperwork and here is the thing people get surprised by: I have no certificates. None. Zero. I have a degree. That is a different animal and it opens a different door, and there is a whole category of door it does not open at all.

Meanwhile a man can sit in his car on his lunch break, work through the training on his phone, take a proctored exam from that same phone, and come out the other side holding a credential an employer actually asks for. For about what two combo meals cost.

Do I regret the degree? No. It taught me how to think and it is part of how I ended up building what I build. But I will not stand here and pretend the long way is the only honest way, because that is a lie old men tell young men to make their own bill feel worth it.

If this had been around when I came up, I would have run it. Both. The degree and the certificates. Why would I pick.

What it actually is, from reading it myself

Fourth time, and I mean it: I have never used this app. Everything below is read off their own pages and checked where it could be checked.

It is a phone app that runs online trade certifications end to end. It trains you, and for the EPA 608 it lets you take the actual exam on the phone. Not a practice test. The real one, proctored, on your schedule, at whatever hour you are actually free.

Everything in that table came off skillcatapp.com or the App Store listing on the day this was written. Prices move. Check before you put a card in.

Stop looking for your job title. Look for your field.

This is where people trip, so slow down with me.

When I started running my mouth about this I said go get down, any trade, sheet metal, electrician, plumber, pipe fitter, all of them. Then I said the honest part: I ain’t never looked. So I went and looked. And the first time I looked, I looked wrong. You get both passes, because the mistake is the lesson.

First pass I went hunting for sheet metal as its own course. Did not find one. Figured it was missing and almost told you so. That was me asking a dumb question with a straight face.

Sheet metal ain’t a field. It is a category inside HVAC. You fabricate, you hang duct, you run the system. That is HVAC work, and HVAC is the word an employer uses when they go looking for you. Can’t nobody hand you a job off a sheet metal cert the way an EPA 608 does.

Same as astrology. Astrology ain’t its own universe, it is a category sitting under metaphysics, and so is numerology. You do not go shopping for a numerology degree. You learn the field, and the categories come with it.

Second pass. I quit reading the top menu and read the whole site, and here is a thing worth knowing: the menu undersells it badly. The top of the page shows you five fields. The footer, where nobody looks, shows you eleven.

So the move is not to search your job title and see if it comes up. The move is to name your field, then go look at everything sitting under it. Most people walk in asking for one branch and walk out never knowing the whole tree was on the shelf.

One cert ain’t nothing. Go load up.

Now here is the part that actually moves money, and almost nobody does it. If you take one thing out of this whole post, take this one.

The ten dollars ain’t for a course. It’s for the catalog.

Read that twice. People sign up, grab the EPA 608, feel good about themselves, and cancel the subscription. They just paid for a whole building and used one room in it.

Their own pricing page spells it out: the membership is 300 plus accredited courses and exams across every field they carry, plus EPA 608, EPA 609, OSHA 10, NATE, CPO, trade school diplomas, 3D simulations that run like the real equipment, career mentors, and live classes with instructors who answer questions. One price. Same ten dollars whether you take one course or take twelve.

So do not go in there and get one cert. Go load up.

And this is where it shows up in your pocket. Their own site puts average HVAC starting pay around eighteen dollars an hour. Starting. I have watched men stack paper and climb off that number faster than anybody told them was possible, into the forties and the fifties inside a year or two of deciding to take it serious.

I am not promising you a number. Nobody can promise you a number, and anybody who does is working you. What I am telling you is what I watched happen with my own two eyes: the ceiling in these trades moves when your paperwork moves, and it moves a whole lot quicker than the long road I took.

One cert is a key to one door. Five certs is a ring of keys and a reason for somebody to keep you on when the work gets slow.

I am giving you more than an A for the game on this one. Go handle your business.

I don’t condone the 9 to 5. Go get the certificate anyway.

You been reading me long enough to know where I stand. I am not out here telling nobody that a job is the destination. The whole reason this company exists is to hand people a way out of trading every hour they got for somebody else’s number.

And I will still tell you to go get the certificate. Both of those are true at the same time and anybody who tells you they cancel each other out is selling something.

Here is why. The man working the 9 to 5 with no credential has one option and it is the option somebody else picks for him. The man working the 9 to 5 with a credential has leverage. He can move. He can name a number. He can take the better shop, or he can stay and quietly build his own thing on the side with real money coming in instead of hope. You do not escape a room by standing still in it. You escape it with more money and more options than you walked in with.

So go on ahead. Do your thing, man. Get the paper. Then use the paper for something bigger than the paper.

And while you at it, understand what you are actually holding. A license or a certification is an asset you own, not a box your employer checked for you. One company has probably been collecting on yours for years without ever saying thank you.

What a certificate don’t do

Last time, and then I will let it go: I have never used this app, so I cannot tell you it is easy or hard. What I can tell you is what no app on this earth does for you.

A credential gets you in the room. It does not make you good in the room. The men I watched walk in quick still had to prove out on the work, and some of them did and some of them did not, same as everywhere.

I said this one already in Path 3. The paper gets you on the job. What you say when you do not know something decides whether you stay.

It also will not make you articulate about what you already know, and that is the gap that costs people the most money. You can run your whole job down in twenty minutes and most people have never once been asked to. And if the reason you have not moved yet is that you are worn out, read why ninety minutes on your own thing wears you out more than eight hours at work, because that is a decision problem, not a stamina problem.

One more. If your instinct is to pay for a thing rather than ask a question about it, that habit is the most expensive rule you got. Ten dollars is cheap. Ten dollars a month for nine months on a course you never opened is not.

Type the whole domain

Practical, and then I am done.

I’m calling everybody on this one

Let me talk to my people for a minute, and then I am going to talk to everybody, because this is the same conversation.

Chi-Town. Family. Friends. Everybody I went to high school with. Everybody I went to grammar school with. People I ain’t talked to in years who are going to see this come across their phone. I am calling all of you out by name without saying a single name.

And if you are not from Chicago, do not click off. This ain’t a Chicago thing, it’s a situation thing, and the situation is the same in Denver, in Houston, in Detroit, in a town I never heard of. Somebody reading this is working hard and standing still. That is who I am talking to.

Here is what I am not telling you to do. I am not telling you to go stand on nobody’s block. I am not telling you to go get down with nothing that puts your freedom on the table. I have never in my life told anybody that and I never will.

I am telling you there is another way, and it costs ten dollars.

Pick a lane. I do not care which one.

Maybe certs ain’t your thing. Fine. Then go build your credit. That is a lane and it is a real one and it compounds.

Maybe credit ain’t it either. Then go start something. Entrepreneurship is a lane. Harder, slower, and it belongs to you at the end.

Maybe you are in the 9 to 5 and you are staying a while. Then stack certs while you in there and walk out with more than you walked in with.

I am not particular about which road you take. I am particular that you are on one.

Because here is the thing I keep coming back to, and it is the whole reason this company exists:

Everybody is going through it. Everybody. The clock runs on all of us the same. Going through it is free and it happens whether you participate or not. Growing through it costs you something on purpose, and ten dollars a month is about the cheapest tuition that word has ever carried.

And look, I will say the quiet part

I want to push this down your throat. I really do. I have been sitting here trying to work out what it would actually take to make a grown man go look at a website, and I am coming up short.

What do I gotta do, kidnap you? Get the funnel out? Hold your head back and pour it in? I do not even want to pour Kool-Aid down your throat, so you know it ain’t that. It is water. It is the boring useful thing that keeps you alive and nobody gets excited about it until they are out.

So I will do the only thing I can actually do, which is tell you plain and then leave you alone about it.

If you reading this out loud or listening to it somewhere, the link is sitting right in the body of this article. Go find it. It ain’t hiding.

I am giving you more than an A for the game on this one. Take it or do not. But do not tell me later that nobody ever put you on.

Where I land on it

I have never used it. I have said that five times now and I meant it every time, because the day I start pretending to have done things I have not done is the day this whole thing is worthless to you.

What I have got is this. I spent two compressed years and came out with a degree and zero certificates. I watched men pick up the certificate in a fraction of that and walk straight into work, and my first feeling about it was wrong. They were not cheating. They were reading.

If you work HVAC, plumbing, electrical, maintenance, appliance repair, iron, crane, solar, welding inspection, oil and gas, or you just need a forklift card, your field is already on there. And if the only thing between you and a better number is paper you keep putting off, there is a ten dollar road to that paper and it is approved by the people who are supposed to approve it. Go look. Then go load up, because one cert is money left on the table.

And if you are in a trade that is not on the list yet, do the same thing I just did. Go look. Do not take my word, do not take theirs. Dig. Build. Grow. In that order.

Keep it solid.