Best Online Education Options?
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Moving Your Career Forward ⏩
It’s not a secret that the job market is super competitive these days. Whether you’re actively looking for a job now, or you have a job, but still want to advance your career, education is a great way to give you an advantage.
But not just any education – it needs to be verifiable; you need to have something to show for it.
In this article, I’m going to talk about the different education options that exist that can be done online. This means you have flexibility in pursuing the education, and therefore, no excuse not to learn!
I’ll also be ranking them in terms of value, which is to ask: how much will it do for you in terms of landing a job?
So let’s get started!
1. Online University Degree 🎓
Not surprisingly, degrees are still the standard and universally recognized. Even with all the new education options out there in the market today that I’ll be talking about shortly, a degree, on average, is still going to give you the best likelihood of landing a job.
Part of the reason is that the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) tools that companies use to receive job applications may be screening for degrees. This is usually an automated system, so unfortunately, sometimes it’s as simple as “no degree, no moving forward in the process”.
However flawed that methodology may be, you have to consider the volume of applications some of these companies get, and they’re looking for simple ways to filter. A degree is one of those simple filters, whether it be a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree for some roles.
Good news is, particularly for master’s degrees, you actually don’t need to spend 6-figures to get a degree from a reputable university.
University of Illinois and Boston University are Top 100 globally ranked universities, and offer online MBA degrees for around $24K.
Georgia Tech and University of Texas, two incredible universities with top tier engineering programs, offer computer science degrees for just $10K.
There’s more out there, but those are the notable ones that I consider to be the absolute best values for master’s degrees.
2. Certifications 📃
If you want something that generally costs less than degrees, takes less time to do, and is specific to certain job fields, certifications are a great option!
In most, or all cases, earning one requires passing an exam, typically in-person. But if the exam is online, it’s usually proctored using your webcam and some other software.
But putting aside the exam, all the studying you do, you can do on your own time, and you have access to a lot of great online resources. Certifications can carry a lot of weight, especially in industries like IT, that favor specific knowledge and skill sets.
Two examples are CompTIA, which is a company that offers a whole catalog of IT certifications. They’re well recognized in the industry, so this one is a clear option
A PMP certification is another option as it also has great recognition across industries. This one is for those looking at careers in Project Management. The exam is quite difficult, but worth pursuing if this path is of interest.
3. Online Certificates 💻
Now what exactly is the difference between certifications and certificates? It’s a bit of a grey area, but certifications typically involve a proctored exam, and the jobs and fields in which certifications are valuable, or even required in some cases, are limited to specific skills / industries.
Certificates are different. Much more open on subject matter and what institutions, organizations, and companies can offer them.
All its really designed to showcase, is that you’ve taken and completed coursework on a particular subject. Rigorous exams generally are not involved here.
That said, not all online certificates are created equal. There’s quite the variety of how these online programs are delivered and the validity of the certificates in the market.
So let’s break down a few options that are subsets of online certificates, with its own ranking.
University Certificates
These are online courses with prerecorded content taught by faculty and/or some other industry professionals that the university contracts out to. Sometimes virtual live sessions are a part of these courses, but not always. Some of the courses are offered directly by the university, like the Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning course that I’m currently a part of through the University of Texas at Austin. Or they offer it in partnership with some online learning platform like Coursera or edX.
Company Certificates
Another option are to explore certificates offered by some of the top companies in a particular field. You’ll typically find these through online learning platforms that I mentioned just a moment ago like Coursera and edX. But outside of universities, these certificates will carry some weight as recruiters will generally be familiar with these companies.
Some examples are Google, Meta, and IBM, who all offer a variety of career certificates in high demand fields like data analytics, UX design, digital marketing, and IT support.
Industry Expert Certificates
Basically any course program that isn’t offered by a university, organization, or company, and is taught by some expert in the industry. While the content and learning can be of very high quality, these are the least impactful in terms of the certificate being valuable to recruiters. The benefit is that they tend to be very inexpensive.
One example is Udemy, that offers a platform for individual course creators to put out their content to sell. Some of the content is extraordinarily good, but I would approach these courses as a way to just learn skills, and potentially learn with the goal of pursuing some certification, where there’s an exam you need to pass.
Another example is CourseCareers, which goes a little bit further in providing career support as part of their programs.
Bootcamps
This is a tough one to pin down because boot camps can be offered by organizations or universities. They also tend to be packed with content and designed to get you up to speed very quickly on certain skills with the goal of landing you a job in a relatively short amount of time.
Costs of bootcamps vary substantially and the career outcomes also vary dramatically. There are some worthwhile ones out there, but you just need to really assess what your career goals are and what skills you already have, to know whether a bootcamp would be worth it.
One example that I like is a company called Springboard, who offers a job guarantee if you go through any of their career course programs. There’s a caveat to that guarantee that I talk about in this article.
But nonetheless, it puts a really good structure in place to help you learn and land a job.
My Education Journey 🛣️
I’ve had a lot of my own personal experience with online education that has helped me advance my career, and if you want to learn about what the Coursera platform has done for me, watch this video.
And if you want to learn about my online MBA journey and how that has helped me, here’s another video for you!
Hope this helps - best of luck in your career journey!
RW
