Reducing the Barrier to Learning

We launched a series of free, open courses on YouTube and reduced our subscription price. Why? Because we want to provide more learning opportunities to more people who want to learn. Less friction. Fewer barriers. More access to our training.

Free, open courses

For nearly 20 years, CBT Nuggets learners have earned certifications, promotions, and raises by training with us. Throughout most of that time, the "CBT Nuggets learner" has been defined as a paying customer. But that's changed.

There's an entire community of IT professionals who learn with CBT Nuggets without ever entering their credit card. No. We're not talking about pirates. We're talking about the tens of thousands of IT professionals who learn about career progression and certification news on the CBT Nuggets blog every month. We're also talking about the hundreds of thousands of people who learn IT basics on our YouTube channel.

This year, we're building more content specifically for you — for free.

Intro to IT courses. Everyone has to start somewhere. For most CBT Nuggets learners that might be A+ or Network+. But, we want to expand our course offerings to aspiring IT professionals as well.

The Intro to IT series comprises exploratory courses for the IT career field. They'll examine what jobs are available, how to get those jobs, and the technical basics. The first four are already live on YouTube.

• Intro to Cybersecurity

• Intro to Systems Administration

• Intro to Business Intelligence

• Intro to Programming

In the coming months, you can expect to see more open content from us. It'll be developed by the same great trainers and validated with quizzes in the same way as the paid training experience. But they'll be free and open on YouTube.

Monthly subscriptions are now $59

Every so often we take a look at our pricing. Back in 2013, we started offering monthly subscriptions for $99. A few years ago, we made every learner — not just those with an annual license — a Premium Subscriber. That unlocked practice exams, virtual labs, and access to the Learner Community for everyone, effectively reducing the monthly price to $84.

Today, our monthly subscription is $59, or $599 annually.

We've made some big improvements in the past couple of years. We've added virtual labs, in-video quizzes, and opened the Learner Community. Last year alone we added four new trainers to teach business intelligence, collaboration, AWS, and VMware courses.

As we continue to grow, we'll always look for ways to improve whether that's expanding content, improving learning tools, or even reducing the cost, but never at the cost of quality.