Fake or Genuine – do we care enough?

You may have come across stray people who are offering ‘branded’ merchandise, such as sun glasses, mobile phones, watches dirt cheap. You do not even bother to check their merchandise. Why? You for sure know that it is impossible to get a genuine product at this price.

Switch to a scenario where you are looking for options to get professional education. Again there are many players in the market ready to offer you courses in specialized software such as SAS or SAP at an unbelievable price. Many times the prospect of pocket-friendly education lures you and you feel happy that you have gotten a good ‘value for money’. Is that really true? We'll see.

The P&L statement of genuine education providers shows that a large part of the expenses goes in two heads – licensing cost and faculty remuneration. Licensing cost for proprietary software is typically high and so is the cost of hiring a real experienced faculty. On the other hand, the unauthorized education providers do not have to worry about these costs. They just need to buy a DVD containing pirated software and install it on the computers.  About trainers - half-trained faculty members can be easily hired from the market at a cheap rate. After all, since the ticket price is low, the institute cannot afford to hire a high-profile faculty member. When the software is pirated and the trainers are inexperienced, it is difficult to expect that the software will work with all standard features and the trainer will be able to address all learning difficulties. But who is complaining? Since you have gotten a good deal, some compromises have to be made. It's common sense!  

Another major factor that makes a difference is the infrastructure. Given the fee charged by the unauthorized education providers, they cannot offer a very comfortable training facility. Often the courses are held in a small apartment, in an extra room of a dwelling unit or even in a marriage hall at times. Since the money involved is less, neither the provider feels guilty, nor do you feel the need for him/her to feel so.

The comparison will remain incomplete without discussing the research and development. The genuine education provider invests a lot in research and development of new products or approaches in line with the evolving industry requirements. Naturally, a part of this investment is recovered from the course fee charged by such institutes. On the other hand, a fake institute just has to copy the formula and implement it. As a candidate, you are delighted at the prospect of paying less for a proven and working formula.

The last element of comparison is the placement service. The unauthorized institutes have managed even this element to make their business model viable. When you have fake software, fake faculty, it is not so difficult to craft a fake experience for you. Genuine institutes cannot do so and probably that’s why they just thrust upon building the competence from within and preparing ourselves to be able to crack the job interviews. However, this route is tedious as it often involves working hard to mould yourself. And hence you prefer the option provided by fake institute. Thus, all of a sudden you become an experienced professional with 2 or 3 years (not enough? No problem! The more you pay extra, the more experienced you can become!) of work experience with a leading organization and you enjoy this overnight stardom. After all, we all like shortcuts, don’t we?

So you have gotten a good ‘deal’, a ‘reasonable’ training and a good job, although after having managed some things here and there. Life OK? Not for everyone and not all the time.  Some challenges can come your way as you work at your ‘hard-earned’ job.  E. g.  You get a task to use on a feature that was not working in the institute you trained from. Or you find it difficult to solve a technical problem in an area which you had claimed to have a good experience on. Or a more severe one where you are asked to explain when the employment verification agency discovers that you have shown fake experience in your resume. But one need not worry about such things and lose his or her sleep. All such risks are bound by the notorious theory of probability – they may or may not materialize. So why to worry? We’ll handle them when they manifest themselves.         

Someone has said – There ain't no such thing as a free lunch . When you pay less for a seemingly similar product or service, you commit yourself to making up for the difference, in other ways throughout the consumption cycle. As the punch-line of a tooth paste commercial goes, the cheap may turn out to be costlier in the long run. Of course, if you care for it at all.

Please share your views on the post. I’ll be eager to hear them.

  

PS - CliPLab, is a professionally managed institute that takes pride in offering genuine educational programs for candidates aspiring to enter the clinical SAS programming field. If you are interested in knowing more about the offerings, please do visit the website.