PNPT Review — The Cert That Punches Way Above Its Price Tag

If you’ve read my OSCP review, you already know I took the PNPT first. This post is a full breakdown of that experience and why I think it deserves a lot more attention than it typically gets, especially when you stack it up against the more expensive options on the market.

What Is the PNPT?

The Practical Network Penetration Tester (PNPT) is a certification from TCM Security. At its core, it’s a full simulated penetration test. You’re given access to an environment, and your job is to work through it like you would a real engagement — external recon, getting a foothold, pivoting internally, compromising Active Directory, and wrapping it all up with a professional report and a live presentation to the TCM team.

That last part — the presentation — is something you won’t find on most other certs. More on that in a bit.

How the Training Is Delivered

When I went through it, the PNPT’s course content was delivered primarily through video. TCM Security’s courses are taught by practitioners, and the quality is genuinely good — clear explanations, practical examples, and a style that feels more like learning from a colleague than sitting through a lecture. It’s not a reading-heavy curriculum or a dry wall of documentation. You watch, you follow along, you build the muscle memory.

That delivery style is worth mentioning because it shapes how you absorb the material. For a lot of people, it clicks faster than trying to grind through dense written content. It’s accessible without being dumbed down.

The Exam Environment

The exam itself is a full penetration test against a multi-machine environment. You’re not just popping individual boxes in isolation — you’re working through a simulated network the way you would on an actual engagement. That means chaining findings, moving laterally, and building a complete picture of what you compromised and how.

You get five days to complete the assessment, and then two additional days to write and submit your report. After that, you present your findings.

The extended timeframe sounds comfortable, but don’t let it lull you into a false sense of pace. Five days across a bigger environment means your notes are everything. You will not remember what you did on day one by the time you’re writing the report on day six. I kept detailed notes for every machine, every command that mattered, every finding with its evidence — because when you sit down to write that report, you’re essentially reconstructing the entire engagement from your documentation. If the notes aren’t there, the report suffers.

The Report and Presentation

The report is not short. This is a full professional penetration testing report — executive summary, methodology, findings with severity ratings, steps to reproduce, remediation recommendations. It takes real time and effort to do it properly, and it should. That’s the point. The PNPT is preparing you to deliver the kind of work product a client would actually receive, not just to check a box.

After submitting the report, you do a live presentation with TCM Security. Mine ran about 15 minutes, and it wasn’t intimidating. The vibe wasn’t adversarial — it felt more like a debrief. You walk through what you did, explain your findings, and talk about your methodology. The impression I got was that the presentation exists to confirm you actually understand what you submitted. If you wrote the report yourself and know your engagement, you’ll be fine. It’s a gut check, not a grilling.

How It Compares to the OSCP

This is where it gets interesting. The OSCP is the industry standard name-brand cert, and it has the price to match — typically around $1,499 for the course and exam bundle. The PNPT, when I took it, came in at a fraction of that cost.

For that price difference, here’s what you’re getting with the PNPT that the OSCP doesn’t offer in the same way:

A more realistic engagement format. The OSCP includes both standalone machines and an Active Directory set, but the AD portion starts from an assumed breach position — you’re handed initial access and work from there. The PNPT is not assumed breach. You start from the outside and earn every step of the way in, working through the network the way you would on a real engagement. That end-to-end flow, from initial recon through full domain compromise, is what makes it feel closer to actual penetration testing work.

A report and a presentation. The OSCP requires a report. The PNPT requires a report and you have to stand behind it in front of someone. That’s a meaningful difference if you’re heading toward a career where you’ll be presenting findings to clients.

Video-first training that’s genuinely practical. TCM’s instructors know their material and teach it in a way that sticks. A lot of what I learned going through the PNPT prep transferred directly into my OSCP work — material I had already covered made the more expensive cert more manageable.

That last point is probably the one I come back to most. The PNPT taught me things that were directly applicable to the OSCP, a cert that costs significantly more and is considered a step up. That says something about the quality of what TCM has put together.

Final Thoughts

If you’re trying to break into penetration testing or level up your practical skills, the PNPT is one of the best value propositions in the certification space right now. It’s realistic, the training is solid, and completing it means you’ve run a full simulated engagement from start to finish — including the reporting and the presentation that comes with it.

The OSCP is still worth pursuing if you have the budget and the career goals that align with it — I’d recommend doing the PNPT first and then working toward the OSCP. The foundation it builds carries over in ways you’ll actually feel when you get to the harder cert.

But if budget is a constraint, or you want to prove your skills without spending over a thousand dollars? The PNPT makes a strong case for itself on its own terms.