CNCP Course Review

Over the past few months (March 7 - May 2, 2009) I took part in the Certified Nanotechnology Clean Technology Certification (CNCP) course being offered by the California Institute of Nanotechnology in San Jose, CA. The cohort I was part of was their third ever official class and this article is meant to give an overview on the course as it was at that time, provide guidance for prospective students, critique the offering, and identify alternative clean technology courses.

I first discovered the Certified Nanotechnology & Clean Tech Professional course on Craigslist while adding events to our CleanTech Authority Events Calendar. I proceeded to call the director of the program, Lloyd Tran, and even drove to the classroom site headquarters at 1290 Parkmoor Avenue in San Jose, CA 95126 to get the scoop. For anyone who wants to follow up as I did, their San Jose number is 408-280-6266. At the time of my enrollment there was only one location to choose from but in recent months an LA branch has also opened at 6080 Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045 and it can be reached at 310-220-4365. It is worth noting that the California Institute of Nanotechnology, the International Association of Nanotechnology (IANANO), and the Clean Tech Institute are all interrelated and grouped together. I imagine these various naming schemes are in place as a way to raise funding and garner interest from different groups of students. Personally, I feel this makes it more challenging to distinguish the structure of the CNCP program and may allow for a student's selective perception to guide him or her into the CNCP certification with the expectation of more focus than is actually offered regarding California, Nanotechnology, or Clean Tech. In my experience the course was unfocused and broad in its approach.

After befriending the staff and further reviewing the course materials I chose to enroll and paid close to $4,000 (including registration fees) for a spot in the class. I realize that this course fee seems very large, and indeed I had my second thoughts. One of the clauses for registration is that monthly payments can be made or you can get a discount for an up front payment. Even so, there is a partial refund available for students who choose to drop within the first week. This one week trial "out clause" comforted me but the truth is, our first class had very little substance and was spent making contacts and creating groups. There was no way to determine the overall worth of the class, that feeling of uncertainly and vagueness is part of what I mean to address in this course review.

Building your personal network in the clean technology and nanotech space is one of the more valuable parts of the CNCP course. The people who were in my class ranged from successful international entrepreneurs and chemists, a doctor who was planning to return to China under their "Sea Turtle" sponsorship (to bring entrepreneurs back from the US), and a few people who had recently lost their jobs at Genentech and other leading firms in the area. Overall, a very smart and driven group. I was one of the younger students (being 25) with most in their thirties and forties. Additionally, much of the staff running the program is made up of past students. Some of the students have even gone on to start small companies and that is covered and promoted during multiple lectures, but none of the companies have really taken off at this point.

In addition ot the entrepreneurial spirit that the course fosters, one of the core CNCP offerings is help in locating a new full time corporate style job. The CNCP course itself is marketed as a way for those with traditional project management or engineering skills to transition into the emerging clean tech space. The certification is meant to provide an edge against other applicants who may have the skills, but lack the broad background, vocabulary, connections and up to date knowledge of these new industries. Just how recognized the CNCP certification actually is may be up for debate. Considering that roughly half of my classmates were unemployed or looking to switch jobs, this focus on finding a new job was a good fit but hard to measure in terms of success and job placement.

The CNCP program staffs job development and outreach managers whose job it is to work one-on-one with students in order to place them in apprenticeships, internships, and full time jobs. Furthermore, each week while attending class there is a cork board outside the classroom with paper job printouts advertising the latest jobs that CNCP coordinators have sourced. While these jobs were marketed by the CNCP staff as being "exclusive" I found many of them advertised elsewhere and did not hear back from the employers I pinged, even though I referenced my involvement with the CNCP class. I suppose most employers are just overwhelmed with the sheer number of applicants trying to get a job right now. I cannot speak for other classmates but I would call this a mixed bag and a less valuable resource than I had hoped for.

Our classes were held weekly on Saturdays from 9am to 4ish. Some days went longer nearing 6pm and others were ended at 2:30pm allowing teams to meet up and work on their group projects. These projects, of which there are two, are meant to bring students together and foster creativity in the nanotech and cleantech space. They reminded me of the group projects I did in undergrad at the University of Colorado at Boulder while studying business, creating a basic business plan. This was one of the more interesting and useful parts of the course and with the culmination of each project, groups were asked to do professional presentations for the rest of the class. In this way, each group teaches the rest of the class about their area of focus. After all of the presentations are complete, points are awarded to the "best" business plans and those points are factored into the grade that each student receives. Even though there are grades given for weekly group homework assignments, group projects, and the final, I never received an official grade and one of the assignments I turned in was either lost or ignored by the staff as the grade is still outstanding despite multiple email follow ups. Considering that the group projects were one of the more valuable and interesting parts of the class, they were not what I expected from a certification style offering. I'm not sure that the best way to create clean tech "professionals" is to allow students to randomly choose topic relating to nanotechnology or clean tech and then self research and teach mildly researched topics to each other... Again, the course costs too much for a do it yourself approach and there was a huge lack of structure, direction and discipline on the group projects.

A typical day in the CNCP course would roughly follow this outline: two 1.5 hour lectures by one of the CNCP staff including Lloyd Tran or an industry representative, lunch, two more 1.5hr lectures, group meetup time, finish. Several of these lecture chunks were dedicated to the training and use of a scanning electron microscope. In terms of teaching materials, each lecture provided students with 20-50 sheets of single sided black and white notes to be put into a three ring binder provided on the first day. Considering the class is focused on clean tech I was disappointed that only one set of notes was printed double sided. It was also frustrating that none of the notes were offered in digital form as nearly every student brought a laptop to class and it would have made studying for the final a lot easier in terms of searchability and note taking. In an effort to keep my own notes organized I went out of my way to ask every single member of the staff for digital copies of our class notes, I even asked the speakers themselves for their powerpoint slides but never received them.

So was the course worth it? Would I recommend it to others who are close to LA or San Francisco and the Bay Area looking to broaden their knowledge of the clean tech space? The answer is maybe, but probably not for someone who has already been following these industries on their own. For me $4K was a lot of money to pay for a class that spends over half of it's time focusing on Nanotechnology. Over five hours were spent using an outdated Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) alone, and while that is interesting, I doubt I will ever use those skills. I signed up for the course specifically to learn more about clean technology, solar, wind, electric cars... and to get a certification. I wanted to make Obama proud! The program director assured students that nanotechnology is playing a key role in each of these new cleantech industries, but I'm still not convinced, especially because I have a business marketing background and am not an engineer. It's worth noting that in order to enroll in the class you have to pass an hour long math/science test with over 50 questions and that I scored a 98%, so it's not like I couldn't understand the nanotech science stuff, it just wasn't relevant to me. I was told that part of the reason so much of the course is spent focusing on nanotechnology is because much of the funding comes from government grants focused on that industry. We literally only spent one day on solar and a half day on wind and electric vehicles. Additionally, some of the speakers for these topics (who were invited, probably on a volunteer basis from the immediate area) sounded more like salesmen than teachers. It's not all bad, and I mean no disrespect for those individuals who took time to come in and share with us. There were three lectures I can clearly remember that I would describe as being great, but I would not spend $4k for three great lectures spanning under five hours total, and I found myself nodding off and doing outside work on my laptop in too many other lectures to give the class overall a great rating. The truth is, if I had not paid so much to take the course I would have ditched a few of the sessions (as many of my classmates ended up doing despite the cost). It is worth noting that I attended every single lecture, SEM lab, and out of class lunch session.

So what are the alternatives? Considering the cost, lack of focus, and misallocation of time that I experienced in the CNCP course there are several other classes in the Bay Area that I have found to be quite valuable and affordable. While none of the alternatives I have listed here come with a fancy certification, many of them have been much more informative and actionable than the CNCP in my experience.

My first recommendation is the continuing studies program that Stanford University offers. As I was taking the CNCP course from the Clean Tech Institute in San Jose, I was also taking a course at Stanford called What's the Real Deal with Oil, Gas, and Coal?, SCI 24, offered by the Energy Resource Engineering department. While this course only met once a week for 2 hours, it also only cost $300 and was taught by a focused expert who spoke English I could understand (another drawback of several of the CNCP sections). This course helped me to frame where energy comes from and how clean technology fits into the world's future. Unlike the CNCP course, there were many things in this course that I could not have learned from browsing the web independently. For those of you who are interested, unfortunately this particular course will not be taught again for a while but I can recommend the book Oil 101 by Morgan Downey. It is an excellent history of the world and Oil's role in it. This upcoming summer semester the Stanford continuing ed program is offering another course called Clean Tech Entrepreneurship which comes highly recommended to me from a friend I met in the Energy Resource course at Stan. Again, this course only costs $300, which is amazing to me considering it is private. I am enrolled in the Clean Tech Entrepreneurship course now and will report on that once I have finished.

For those who want a more hands on, mechanical engineering type approach to clean technology, there is a company in Redwood City, CA (just south of San Francisco on 101) called the TechShop which calls itself an "open access public workshop" and allows community members to use advanced tools and learn skills in construction, coding, and project development. While not all of these courses are clean tech related, they are some of the most affordable and useful classes I've taken and could probably be used to learn how to install solar panels, do basic chip programming, and work on electric vehicles.

I hope that these words have acurately represented the CNCP course without being too harsh on a program that was only two sections old when I took it. I am optimistic about their potential to help teach and connect people to clean tech jobs in the community but also see room for improvement. If you took the course or have questions and feedback please post them here and if you are looking for jobs in the clean tech space please visit our free job board at greenjobsauthority.com