But what if your industry is 100% offline based and is suffering the post-COVID effect? The most reasonable way out of this is to get new qualifications and launch a brand new, online-based career.
If you Google ‘Online education’, you get 3 750 000 000 results. Obviously, it’s impossible to look through all of them, so here we have a small list of well-known and reliable sources that’ll help you get into a new field.
1. Coursera.
Everybody has heard of it. It’s a fantastic source of all possible skills — Coding, Marketing, Business Management, you name it.
Once Coursera was almost entirely free, you just had to pay for the certificate. Now it’s a bit different, but you still have several options.
For individual courses, you can enroll for free and access all materials and videos, just no certificate to prove you’ve actually done it.
You could choose Coursera Plus, which is a monthly subscription. It gives you unlimited access to 3000+ Specializations and Professional Certificates in various subjects, ranging from data and computer science to personal development. It’s a great way to learn some highly demanded skills and change your life. And those courses are taught by the best — Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and many more. In the end, you get a fancy certificate that you could put in your LinkedIn profile.
The only downside of Coursera is that you have to be fully dedicated to studying. Especially with free courses, it’s so easy to enroll in tons of those and just forget. I personally have been enrolled in five or six for the past two years and haven’t even opened the Introduction video.
So, make sure you’re really ready for changes in your life and only then hit ‘Enroll now.’
2. Udemy.
Quite famous now with some excellent stuff. The website offers 100,000 courses on a variety of subjects. Some of them are free; for some, you have to pay, and the prices range from adequate to outrageous.
For example, I’ve always wanted to learn to code, and if I search ‘Python for beginners,’ I get 10 000 results with prices ranging from 0 EUR per course to 200 EUR.
One of the best things about Udemy is that they offer sales. I still haven’t figured out how to catch those, but sometimes I’m lucky. Right now, for example, it’s a 48-hour Flash Sale, and you can get a top-rated Python course for only 11 dollars instead of the usual 200.
Unlike Coursera, where courses are given by recognized universities, Udemy has courses created by not necessarily professional teachers. And that’s the danger. Because you could be a fantastic expert in something, but you just can’t teach.
But there are various ratings of Udemy courses, so with a bit of patience, you could find outstanding courses. And practice your research skills on the way.
3. edX
It’s a platform created by MIT and Harvard. They offer courses, Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and Professional Qualifications from a range of excellent universities, like Harvard, Berkeley, Boston, MIT, etc.
You can either learn for free or add an official Certificate issued by the platform confirming your completion of the course. Why not show it off on your LinkedIn profile?
