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.
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Cloud
Most people are familiar with the cloud through Dropbox or Google Drive. These services store your data on the Internet, making them retrievable from anywhere the Internet is available.
For businesses, the cloud does this and then some. Companies use the cloud to store data, but also use it to host full-fledged applications. The degree to which companies have adopted the cloud varies. Some companies have fully committed to the cloud to run their entire IT infrastructure. Others are more selective, putting some outward-facing products and services or internal applications here and there in the cloud.
Large enterprise users who depend on the cloud include Netflix, Airbnb, and Expedia, but the total roster is huge. All trends indicate that cloud utilization will only continue its rise in the coming decade.
Today, the largest cloud providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Their main value proposition to businesses is that they relieve them of having to maintain their own costly data centers, allowing them to streamline their IT. They also offer impressive scalability. Companies can spin up servers on a second’s notice to meet a spike in demand and spin down when the going’s easy.
As more companies plug more parts of their operations into the cloud, they’ll need to hire specialists who understand the cloud. Popular cloud roles include developers, engineers, architects, and the recently minted “sysops”.
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Business skills
Business skills span a wide set of competencies ranging from finance and accounting to marketing and strategy. Often, these competencies overlap. (Leadership, management, and communication skills are also critical—we cover these under “soft skills”.)
No matter your role, there’s a good chance that understanding business concepts will propel your career forward. For example, if you’re an analyst studying customer purchases, you might generate better insights understanding the economics and marketing principles driving those purchases.
And if you’re charting for yourself a trajectory into management, you’ll need business skills to succeed. Organizational leaders face challenging questions daily. How can we acquire new customers? Which strategic decisions will drive profitability? How do we deploy our capital in a manner that achieves growth later?
The courses below help you develop frameworks for answering these questions and others like them. Armed with a strong understanding of business, you’ll make yourself more attractive and more valuable to any employer.
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Soft skills
Our tech-shaped workplaces demand that we work both on our own and in teams. To do either well requires soft skills, which bolster our ability to communicate, collaborate, focus, and problem-solve.
Employers know this all too well. One report from SHRM finds 67% of HR managers prefer candidates with strong soft skills even if they lacked technical skills. On the flip side, only 9% of HR managers would hire someone with strong technical skills but weak soft skills.
But soft skills can take time and effort to develop. Without introspection, peer feedback, and mentoring, it can be hard just to know which soft skills in particular to focus on. And even if you have strong soft skills, it never hurts to refine your craft.
The courses we feature come from top universities and thought leaders. Some focus on wellness and motivation, a few will provide guidance for those near the top of the org chart. Most look at interpersonal skills—working in teams, communicating with, and managing others.
Improving your soft skills will make you more employable and more able to lead yourself and others.
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