Worth Your Time: 81 Online Courses for Career Development

We work in the digital age. Technological changes increasingly shape what we do and how we do it. These same changes also define what we need to learn to stay competitive. In no other time has the ability to learn and adapt been so critical to our individual career growth.

Why online courses are more important than ever for professionals

Online courses offer training and development opportunities you can take on your own time. Professionals use them to develop new skills that make them more productive and help open doors. Most courses issue certificates upon completion that you can share on LinkedIn or in your resume.

A Gartner survey asked 2,598 Chief Information Officers to identify barriers they faced in achieving their goals. A lack of skills topped the list. As the report comments, “information and analytics talent gaps persist, with basic skills also in short supply.”

Companies are paying attention, according to Training’s industry report. Overall spending on training increased substantially in the latter half of the last decade. Whether employer training programs address the skills shortage is another question.

Stephane Kasriel, former CEO of Upwork, writes that there’s a “tragedy of commons… [where] individual companies are better off if they leave the cost of training to their competitors.” As a result, companies neglect to train their employees properly. The bright side is that “today's young professionals have more opportunities than ever before to train themselves” through MOOCs and other online resources.

Supporting these claims is a recent survey published in Harvard Business Review. This survey looks at some 1,481 learners who enrolled in online courses about marketing. It finds that professionals are turning to online courses to fill gaps and deepen their industry knowledge.

The survey also shared some anecdotes. One described a woman tasked with managing brands and product lines. A marketer with a degree in chemistry, this person received no formal training in her line of work.

To fill gaps, she enrolled in a Coursera Specialization focused on marketing. Along the way, she learned how to calculate demand and design distribution channels for her products. Others like her—those working in marketing who took a marketing course—made up 40% of survey respondents.

The remaining 60% work in non-marketing fields like operations, finance, and R&D. Their goal in enrolling was to broaden their knowledge in order to improve their work. An example given is that of a data analyst assigned to help launch a new product line. By learning marketing fundamentals, this individual produced better insights and created better interactions with other departments.

These are just a few compelling reasons for taking an online course focused on professional development.

The rest of this article spotlights courses that build skills important to today’s professionals. These are organized by three overarching categories—tech skills, business skills, and soft skills.

Let’s dive in.

Tech skills

In its most recent Learning Trends Report, Udemy shared its findings collected on over 4,000 companies who offer Udemy to their employees. The key takeaway: AI, data science, web development, and cloud technologies lead in top tech skills in 2020.

We introduce a comprehensive list of web development courses in this article. This article will look at data science, AI, and cloud courses.

These skills fundamentally reshape our workplace and drive innovation in new products and services. They also have the potential to reshape our workplaces further. AI, for example, continues to automate more areas that we previously couldn’t with conventional methods. Meanwhile, cloud-based web applications change how customers engage with companies and their offerings.

Whether you’re in a technical field or not, it helps to understand what makes AI tick, how data drives insights, and the infrastructure that powers the cloud.

Data science and AI

Many of the most popular courses on OpenCourser focus on data science and AI. These fields are related. Both leverage large amounts of data either to drive insights or build entirely new applications and products.

Courses in these subfields often focus on a vast array of tools. These include popular data analysis applications like Excel and Tableau and programming languages like Python and R. Those focused on AI meanwhile might learn TensorFlow.

Traditionally, companies have hired data scientists to perform analytics functions. Increasingly, however, data scientists are upskilling into new areas beyond analytics, including innovations and product management. According to one recent analysis from Burtch Works, the hiring market for data science remains active with salaries increasing.

IBM Data Science

Worth Your Time

81 Online Courses for Career Development

Why online courses are more important than ever for professionals

Tech skills

Data science and AI

Cloud

Business skills

Soft skills

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