The most honest measure of a training program is what its alumni say two years after they certified — not on the day they passed the exam. Here is what ours have said.
Quaye doesn't teach the exam — he teaches the work that the exam is trying to measure. By week four I was applying the CISA methodology to my actual audit engagements. Passing the exam afterward felt almost incidental.
Filter by certification or read all. Names are abbreviated for privacy unless an alum has authorized full attribution.
The case-based approach was the difference. I had taken a self-paced CISA prep course before this one — gave up halfway through. With ERK, every domain had a story attached. I sat the exam ten weeks after we started and passed first attempt.
I came in as a senior security engineer trying to make the jump to manager. The CISM track gave me the vocabulary, the frameworks, and — honestly — the confidence to lead the program review I now run quarterly.
What separated this CDPSE track from anything else I considered was the engineering depth. We didn't just review privacy concepts — we worked through actual architecture decisions with the trade-offs spelled out. That's what I needed.
The risk register and KRI design workshops alone were worth the tuition. I took the templates back to my organization and rebuilt our enterprise risk reporting from scratch. The exam was the lesser of the two outcomes.
Quaye knew the answer to every weird edge case I threw at him — and more importantly, knew why ISACA had written the question that way. That kind of instructor depth is rare. Worth every dollar.
What I valued most was that Quaye stayed in our corner after the course ended. I had questions during exam registration; he answered them within hours. After I passed, he helped me think through the next step in my career.
I had been deferring CRISC for two years because every prep option I looked at felt thin. ERK was the opposite — dense, grounded, and unflinchingly honest about where the certification actually adds value versus where it doesn't. That honesty earned my trust.
I enrolled because GDPR and our national data-protection regime were colliding in our roadmap and nobody on the team had a framework. The CDPSE track did not just prep me for the exam — it gave us a working operating model for privacy across the organization.
We enrolled our internal audit team of nine. ERK delivered the cohort onsite over three months, tailored to our industry. Eight of nine passed on first attempt. We are doing CISM with him next.