OSCP+ Review

TL;DR

The OSCP is a good cert, and yeah, passing it feels great. But let’s be real about what you’re actually paying for: recognition. It’s the badge that gets you past HR filters for your first offensive security gig, and for that, it delivers. If what you’re after is the deepest, best-value learning for your money, there are better options out there. Worth it, as long as your wallet can take it.

My background before the OSCP

I’m an offensive security student. I grabbed the Learn One package back in December (caught a promo), and started PEN-200 in January, fitting it around my studies. So I came in with a growing but still pretty green base in hacking, not as some seasoned pentester. I’m flagging this because it colours the whole review: this is the take of someone using the OSCP to break into the field, which is exactly who it’s aimed at.

Why I took it

No mystery here. The OSCP is the cert recruiters and HR filters look for when you’re chasing your first offensive role. That’s the kind of job I’m after, so it was the obvious first box to tick. I went in knowing I was paying partly for skills and partly for a name on my CV, and that’s fine, as long as you’re honest with yourself about it.

Preparation

I did the course from January to late May, taking it easy alongside everything else. Then in June I started hitting machines for real, and got humbled fast. Reading the material cover to cover had not magically turned me into someone who could break into boxes under pressure.

What flipped the switch was just reps. I put in around 8 hours a day for two months and came out feeling genuinely comfortable, but that comfort came from doing, not reading. By the end I’d worked through about 130 machines across Proving Grounds and Hack The Box, in phases, plus the challenge labs.

Those challenge labs are the part I’d single out. The AD-heavy ones (Medtech, Secura, the OSCP A/B/C sets) are what actually give you fluency inside the exam’s 40-point Active Directory set. That’s where it clicks: pivoting, chaining credentials, moving through a domain without stopping to overthink every step. If you only grind standalone boxes and skip the full AD chains, you’ll feel it on exam day.

I also built myself a handful of 24-hour mock exams from machines I’d already rooted, and dropped one nastier box into each set so I couldn’t just coast on autopilot.

The hardest part of the whole thing wasn’t any single technique. It was building a methodology that actually held up. Every time I reckoned my process was bulletproof, a new machine would stop me dead, and I’d realise there was still some enumeration step I wasn’t doing, something that had quietly dropped out of the routine you run on instinct. And for the OSCP, enumeration is the game. The lesson that stuck: your methodology isn’t finished until it stops surprising you. Mine only got there through reps.

The exam experience

The exam works, but it’s the weakest part of the package. A few honest gripes:

• The proctoring needs dragging into this decade. It threw more than one problem at me, and for what you’re paying, it should just work.
• The dashboards are ugly and clunky, both the proctoring tool and the flag submission panel. Purely cosmetic, it all functions fine underneath, but it doesn’t feel like a premium product.
• The 24-hour proctored format feels artificial. I get why it’s there: without it, OffSec couldn’t really sell the “realistic” and “respected” angle the cert leans on. But a full day under a webcam is nothing like a real engagement.

On the machines themselves, I’ll just say that, within the luck of the draw, my set was a bit underwhelming. That’s the randomness of what you pull on the day, not a structural gripe. Someone else’s set could be brilliant.

The report

The report is a real part of the exam, and honestly it’s one of the more genuinely useful bits of the whole thing, because documenting findings clearly is an actual job skill. I ran a two-layer system: rough, messy notes while hacking, then a clean report built in the window afterwards. Wrote it in Markdown and compiled it to PDF with Pandoc and the Eisvogel template, every flag backed by a screenshot. Set this pipeline up before exam day. You really don’t want to be fighting your toolchain when you’re fried.

What I’d do differently

I’d flip the ratio. I spent roughly six months taking the course nice and slow, then found out that practice was the thing that actually taught me. If I started over, I’d read the material fast, take really short notes, and then flesh those notes out in practice, getting into the mud early instead of reading quietly for half a year. That’s the study style I’ve landed on, and the OSCP is where I figured that out about myself.

Who should take it

Take it if:

• You want a reliable way past HR filters for your first offensive security job, and you’ve already got a base in hacking.
• You learn by doing, not by reading. The labs are where the value lives.
• You’re leaning toward red team. It teaches a bit of everything but only goes just deep enough. Honestly, it points more at red team than web pentesting.

Skip it (or wait) if:

• Your wallet can’t comfortably take it. It’s a lot of money.
• You want maximum learning per euro. The web side especially stayed pretty basic, and mostly came down to public exploits run more or less automatically. You’ll get way more depth elsewhere.

Final verdict

The OSCP is a solid cert and I don’t regret it. But I’d only recommend it if you can afford it, because what you’re really paying for is the recognition. If you’re paying for content quality and depth, there are better and cheaper routes. The CPTS is the obvious one: same ground, a quarter of the price, denser and deeper, just not proctored. Pick the OSCP for the name on the CV. Pick something else if the name isn’t what you need.