Course certificates worth it from online education site? - EdX, Coursera etc

[ronz91]

Hi guys

I am wondering if the paid versions of courses that usually give a certificate are worth the money in terms of career advancement.

I already take these courses for free and I do learn from them.

What is the best way to get ones toes wet with building a formidable CV?

Thanks

 

[WAslayer]

Portfolio with evidence of work..

 

[B-1]

They do give an indication of your level of understanding. If you can pass those courses then the expectation is that you have a certain level of understanding. As mentioned above another way of doing that is a portfolio of work but for many you cant exactly share private company IP so unless you have time to contribute to open source or build your own systems you need to find alternatives.

 

[Kornhub]

Hi guys

I am wondering if the paid versions of courses that usually give a certificate are worth the money in terms of career advancement.

I already take these courses for free and I do learn from them.

What is the best way to get ones toes wet with building a formidable CV?

Apply for financial aid on coursera and you can get the course for free (You will need to apply for every unit you are doing though and approval takes like a month a time, so once you are approved for the first one you can just apply for the next one in the meantime). I wanted to do this one but realised IBM is not really here in South Africa

IBM Full Stack Software Developer

Offered by IBM. Kickstart your career in application development. Master Cloud Native and Full Stack Development using hands-on projects ... Enroll for free.

www.coursera.org

 

[ronz91]

Portfolio with evidence of work..

They do give an indication of your level of understanding. If you can pass those courses then the expectation is that you have a certain level of understanding. As mentioned above another way of doing that is a portfolio of work but for many you cant exactly share private company IP so unless you have time to contribute to open source or build your own systems you need to find alternatives.

What about non-IT courses?

 

[ronz91]

Apply for financial aid on coursera and you can get the course for free (You will need to apply for every unit you are doing though and approval takes like a month a time, so once you are approved for the first one you can just apply for the next one in the meantime). I wanted to do this one but realised IBM is not really here in South Africa

IBM Full Stack Software Developer

Offered by IBM. Kickstart your career in application development. Master Cloud Native and Full Stack Development using hands-on projects ... Enroll for free.

www.coursera.org

I feel your pain.

EdX has AWS courses though

 

[Kornhub]

What courses are you looking at?

 

[ronz91]

What courses are you looking at?

a variety, comp science, math, economics, engineering

 

[Kornhub]

a variety, comp science, math, economics, engineering

Are the ones you looking at have projects you can show ? That should be worth something right?

Edit: I am thinking now that maybe I should just stick with the IBM one and at least have the capstone project to show .

 

[GhostSixFour]

Are the ones you looking at have projects you can show ? That should be worth something right?

Edit: I am thinking now that maybe I should just stick with the IBM one and at least have the capstone project to show .

Skills learned in one cloud platform transfers very well to any other platform. You just need to learn what they call everything, and adjust to some tiny changes. Not a big deal.
There is something to be said for a instructor led course, even if it online. Or, if you wanna go self-study, I'd recommend Azure. Ideally, close out the IBM course, and then do Azure to learn the differences.

What's your goal?

 

[Pegasus]

I bought a couple of courses on Udemy for PMI.org
They cost R100 or so on special.

So I used Udemy to study and then wrote the exams through the PMI exam provider.

 

[Kornhub]

Skills learned in one cloud platform transfers very well to any other platform. You just need to learn what they call everything, and adjust to some tiny changes. Not a big deal.
There is something to be said for a instructor led course, even if it online. Or, if you wanna go self-study, I'd recommend Azure. Ideally, close out the IBM course, and then do Azure to learn the differences.

What's your goal?

Honestly to get a new job I don't have any programming background at all so I feel pretty stuck at the moment. So far I have been thinking about web development (then add some java somehow) or + after doing some of this try and move into android development. But the cloud really interests me for god knows what reason.

 

[Kornhub]

Oh and being 32 doesn't help

 

[GhostSixFour]

Honestly to get a new job I don't have any programming background at all so I feel pretty stuck at the moment. So far I have been thinking about web development (then add some java somehow) or + after doing some of this try and move into android development. But the cloud really interests me for god knows what reason.

So then, honestly, try to pivot to cloud administration or devops. Learn YAML, Linux and do some MS or AWS certs. Full stack programming knowledge not required, perhaps learn scripting.
Or alternatively, https://roadmap.sh/ and pick a direction for upskilling.

 

[GhostSixFour]

Oh and being 32 doesn't help

Well, in 2 years you're gonna be 34 whether you did this or not.. So.. Wanna be 34 with new knowledge or without.

 

[CamiKaze]

It answers the interview question:

"How do you keep yourself up to date with the latest tech out there?"

Answer:

"Read my CV"

 

[ronz91]

Some of them run into 100s of $

 

[cguy]

Hi guys

I am wondering if the paid versions of courses that usually give a certificate are worth the money in terms of career advancement.

I already take these courses for free and I do learn from them.

What is the best way to get ones toes wet with building a formidable CV?

Thanks

Any education has benefit - to leverage these online courses into getting a job, you will likely have to use that knowledge to build a portfolio (eg, for web development).

Apart from the portfolio case above, places I’ve worked at are only interested in them for people who already have degrees, and are looking to specialize or shift their area of focus (eg, computer science degree holder wants to do ML, so we will look at additional online ML/maths/stats courses as a positive on top of their degree).

I am sure that there may be some places that place value on simply
completing these courses alone, but if you want to produce a “formidable” CV, I would look at your degree options.

 

[B-1]

What about non-IT courses?

At the end if the day you need to satisfy a bunch of check boxes to get your foot in the door for the job you want.
Typically your CV will go through a few phases.
1) a recruiter will look at your CV and wonder if they can get you placed to get a commission.
2) a hiring manager or HR person will look at the CV the recruiter or yourself sent as a candidate for the position.

Up to here its typically a checkbox based inclusion/exclusion. Your CV either checks enough boxes to move on or it doesn't

3) you may be asked to write a test or go for a first interview. Here is where your experience starts to count and you need to be able to relate your experience and skills to the position you applied for.

4) typically a culture fit interview but you may get some skill questions if someone missed the prior interview.

You have to look at yourself and your CV and see where your strong and weak points are and relate that to the career you want. Then work on the weak areas and strengthen your best attributes. Usually you need one anchor skill and then build a well rounded set of skills around that. At the end of the day you are a one man business and if you have something that you can sell to another business who can make profit from your services you are off to a good start.

 

[B-1]

Honestly to get a new job I don't have any programming background at all so I feel pretty stuck at the moment. So far I have been thinking about web development (then add some java somehow) or + after doing some of this try and move into android development. But the cloud really interests me for god knows what reason.

Then stick to the cloud. Being interested in what you do goes a long way. With compute on the edge, CI/CD, infrastructure as code etc you can do plenty of coding without writing applications specifically. The cloud space is showing huge growth and is a exiting place to get into.