ONLINE Courses
If you are a college student this blog is for you. When we are in college there is a lot of confusion because there are a lot of online courses to do but how will you end up deciding what is worth for you? and what is not? You want to do it because you want a good job or you are going to do MBA in near future so think from Interviewer’s perspective. You would be in a much better place if you think how is Interviewer going to react after seeing a particular Online Course in your Resume.
Top 5 Factors to be considered before picking any online course.
1. Application: College students have limited budgets, suppose you have 1000- 2000 for online courses so will you buy a course applicable to a specific field or will you buy a course applicable to a variety of jobs or a variety of specializations?
Let me share what happens in MBA colleges. In an MBA college, you don’t prepare 1 resume, you make multiple CV variants. When you write all your achievements on a page, that is your CV. Now, if you wish to sit for a marketing job, then you’ll keep the related points on the top
or you’ll highlight them.
Then, this becomes your marketing CV variant. Similarly, you make a different variant for finance, a different variant for consulting, this happens in most companies and B-schools. After knowing this, the budget you have for courses should be spent on courses with wide/generic applications.
That is, the same course is applicable to multiple fields so that the point can come in all CV variants. You can find many such affordable courses on Udemy
I’ll recommend 3 online courses which are the best courses of 2023 in my opinion and I’d highly recommend you take them.
- Microsoft Excel: Beginner to Advanced. I would recommend this course as must. Excel is a tool used in every field marketing, finance, consulting all of them use Excel in their day-to-day lives.
- Financial Modeling & Valuation: Beginner to Pro. Once you learn base-level Excel, then take up this course by 365 Careers especially if you wish to get into finance, consulting, analytics All the finance & consulting enthusiasts on LinkedIn highly recommend this course.
- Data Science A-Z: Real-Life Examples. There are a very few courses which share real-life applications of any field. This course will be applicable to all such fields. It will give you knowledge of Data Science from scratch and also share practical examples.
2. Depth of the curriculum: Any course shows you the curriculum you’ll study and all the topics you’ll go through. Before enrolling in any course, go through the curriculum or the lesson plan i.e. what are the video topics?
When you mention any course in your resume, you need keywords related to the field you’re applying to e.g. when you take about smart marketing course, there are topics like the 99 effect, and the decoy effect then these are the keywords that can be mentioned in the resume as it is because they are also there in the curriculum so I feel whenever you’re applying to any course do note whether the points are in the curriculum.
3. Spikes: In a resume, spikes refer to extraordinary points that may not be there in someone else’s CV. There are two ways to add spikes to CV. The first is to use popular brand names. Or to use a famous person’s name. The second is to use numbers. E.g. if I say, I was ranked 1. Then it may not be that big a point. But, if I say I was ranked 1 in 2,00,000 people, then it’ll be a big thing. So when we use numbers, we emphasize them.
Now, how to make spikes in the case of courses. Firstly, if the course mentions a person or institute/organization that is famous, in that case it gives you a spike. E.g. a course by XYZ company or a course by ABC b-school, now when you add this point in your CV, you’ll write that organization’s name in bold as it is a spike. So this is one point to be considered.
Secondly, how many people have enrolled in the course or how many people have completed the course that becomes a number. So whenever you’re enrolling in an online course, do consider this number You can add it in your resume, e.g. 1/10k people enrolled in course or 1/100 people who completed in the course, or 1/10 people who excelled in the course with so much score. Any number will be a value-add/spike in your CV.
4. Quantity over Quality: You should do multiple courses i.e. focus on quantity than quality. Quality matters to some extent but if you spend your entire budget on 1 course then that won’t be a wise decision vs if you spend it on different courses.
To understand this well, look at where courses appear in your CV. There are 4-5 portions in your CV. Courses are a part of co-curricular.
Even within that, each course occupies one line. If you spend your entire budget on one course, you’ll get one point despite the effort involved. Instead, if you allocate the 1-2k budget to 3-4 courses your co-curricular portion will have 3-4 points.
If an interviewer sees one CV with a small co-curricular portion and another with 3-4 points under it, then the latter will hold value because that’ll be a balanced CV, hence I believe at the end of the day, quantity matters over quality. Hence, before doing a course, consider its price
and how much proportion is it taking of your budget.
There is only one exception here i.e. a professional certification. If you do a professional course like CA/CFA/CS then this single point can beat all other course points but if you’re taking up normal online courses then I’d always keep quantity over quality.
5. Practical demonstration: Ultimately, you do a course to get a job or college other than upskilling yourself, and before that, you’ll face an interview round. So if the course not only adds value to your CV but helps demonstrate the skill then there’s nothing better in that course.
If you have done a Rs. 500-1000 course and you share that in the interview, how will the interviewer know how much you’ve got out of it?
They would always want to test your knowledge. If you can demonstrate it practically, it’s better. E.g. if you’ve done an Excel course, every interviewer has a laptop or a mobile phone they can ask you to show the application of functions. That way you can demonstrate your skill.
So, these are the 5 factors I’d definitely consider before doing an online course.
