WGU MS ITM review

[posabsolute]

Hi everyone,

I have seven courses completed in the MS ITM, and I just wanted to post about my experience. Obviously, courses at WGU do change, currently, it has eight courses based on projects and two classes with exams. CAPM cert has been replaced by a WGU exam (thank god). My main takeaways is, it is acceleration friendly and more of a check-in a box degree. 

The Projects
I find the projects easy; you can accelerate this degree for sure and be done in 6 months. The projects are always around you as an IT director; how would you approach this situation, make a plan, strategies, etc. If you have experience in IT or software engineering, keep to the rubric and you will run circles around the evaluators, and that is one downside of this; most of the time, you don't have to go very deep to get a passing grade.

The exams 
The exams are challenging, but again, if you have experience in IT you will be fine. However, if you are not a business major and don't have IT experience, you find the exams unforgiving; my mentor told me many of those people retake the exams quite a few times. The issue is the breadth of content to absorb, it's just too large, and without experience, you cannot effectively answer situation-based questions.

WGU and Canada
At the time of this writing, the WGU policy for Canadians is weird, always has been, I guess; you can join the school of IT, but not the school of business. The reason being the professional business accreditation and too many Canadian not completing the programs. Depending on your counsellor, your mileage may vary; it still requires some sort of exemption.

[ss20ts]

Kind of bummed that the CAPM is gone. That was one of the reasons I was interested. I need to schedule some time to work on my CAPM.

[Turkish]

That's great to hear that Canadians can join the IT school. I was originally planning on WGU for a MS but was disheartened when they appeared to no longer take Canadians. I'd rather jump hoops to get in than not be able to attend at all. If you don't mind, can you elaborate on what requirements you had to fulfill in order to attend?

[posabsolute]

Kind of bummed that the CAPM is gone. That was one of the reasons I was interested.

You still get a voucher to take the CAPM for free and can take it if you want to.


Can you elaborate on what requirements you had to fulfill in order to attend?

As far as I know, the only requirement is to be near a Pearson testing center. Like I said tho, enrollment counsellors' knowledge of the Canada policy may differ; the counsellors from the business school (yes the counsellors are per school) will tell you that you cannot join WGU at all. The policies from the 2 schools are completely different.

[bjcheung77]

Congrats, wow, that's pretty quick! Seven of the ten courses completed already!? Keep up the great work! I look forward to reading what the other two courses/exams are all about. It's a very interesting program indeed, competency based degrees are just that, if you know the material, you get to excel, if not, it does take some time to learn as you go, but it's still much faster than a boring traditional set of courses...

[posabsolute]

I wanted to provide a last update on the MSITM.

I just freshly completed the capstone, and to be honest, it kicked my butt quite hard, not in terms of complexity, but in terms of length, it's 2 papers, about 30 pages and another one of 20 pages. They give you a skeleton that gets you through all the sections, block by block.

It's not a research project, it's basically proposing a fake project and doing a post evaluation. The issue for me is that it is heavily grounded in PMI methodology, I'm just not a fan and found it extremely tedious. I saw some people say it's completable in a weekend, I'm an accelerator and I don't see any way this would be possible.

I come out of their program thinking it is quite accelerable with a few gotchas (the 2 exams and capstone), keep at least 1 month for the capstone. It's a good option for a check in a box master, although I sometimes wonder if I should have done the WGU MSDA, but I know there is no way this would have been possible in 1 term (in my case) and this was a big concern when I chose the MSITM.

[ss20ts]

I wanted to provide a last update on the MSITM.

I just freshly completed the capstone, and to be honest, it kicked my butt quite hard, not in terms of complexity, but in terms of length, it's 2 papers, about 30 pages and another one of 20 pages. They give you a skeleton that gets you through all the sections, block by block.

It's not a research project, it's basically proposing a fake project and doing a post evaluation. The issue for me is that it is heavily grounded in PMI methodology, I'm just not a fan and found it extremely tedious. I saw some people say it's completable in a weekend, I'm an accelerator and I don't see any way this would be possible.

I come out of their program thinking it is quite accelerable with a few gotchas (the 2 exams and capstone), keep at least 1 month for the capstone. It's a good option for a check in a box master, although I sometimes wonder if I should have done the WGU MSDA, but I know there is no way this would have been possible in 1 term (in my case) and this was a big concern when I chose the MSITM.

Will you stick around and complete the MSDA now? 

[posabsolute]

No, I got enough degrees for a long while

[bjcheung77]

No, I got enough degrees for a long while

Congrats, great job on finishing so quickly! One term is amazing, I think that's very quick already, I can't imagine people finishing that fast...