What skills do you recommend I pick up via online courses? - #DearTBC
Hi Justine! I'd like to ask if you have any recommendations on what courses to take while we’re in lockdown. I’ve finished many already, but want your advice on what to take to be job-hunting ready when I graduate next year.
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This list is the basic, transferable skill set I think everyone should develop, regardless of their course or background. I’ve also placed the course I recommend you take, which is free for anyone to join and learn from.
Every course on this list, I’ve gone through myself, specifically because I realized a lot of my students were coming in with skill gaps. These courses aren’t the most comprehensive BUT they cover the bases pretty well and they don’t take months to finish, which is exactly why I picked them. Feel free to use these as starting point to finding the right course for you to take though!
So, here are my 5 recommended skills (and courses) to take whenever you’re free.
Basic MS Excel
My recommendation: Useful Excel for Beginners via Udemy
Now you can say you’re “proficient in Excel” in your resume without worrying too much. Don’t be like me though and say that you know or can learn VBA instantly. That stuff’s difficult.
This course is 9 hours long, but most of it you can breeze past. Or watch at 2x speed.
The keyboard and formatting shortcuts are what I like best. Just knowing the Excel basics this covers will make your working life 10x easier, I promise. I wish I watched this before I started working, and deeply regretted all the hours I spent trying to frankenstein a solution that was apparently integrated into Excel already.If you want to take on more advanced Excel skills, there’s a dozen different tracks you can take, like visualization, analysis, PowerBI, etc. Data science fundamental basics can be picked up on Excel too.
Here’s a tweet I wrote on the “intermediate” Excel skills anyone looking to get into corporate should learn.
Public Speaking
My recommendation: Introduction to Public Speaking via Coursera
Did you know that glossophobia, or the fear of public speaking, is 1 of the most common phobias, that affects up to 75% of the population? Which is insane if you think about it. All our lives, we’ll need to speak up and tell people what we think, be it in meetings at work or when we’re making a toast for our friend’s wedding. I think that fear even manifests during 1-on-1 conversations, when you’re not sure how to say what you think, so you end up saying nothing at all.
So, might as well get started on overcoming your glossophobia. I keep mine at bay by giving talks for school orgs. Still nervous whenever I have to give any presentation, but I know I won’t mess up the basics at least.Project Management
My recommendation: Introduction to Project Management from edX
The most basic life skill anyone and everyone should have. All of life is just pushing projects forward; might as well know how to do it well.
Funnily enough, when I started treating get-together planning with friends like a project to manage, it always pushes through and everyone commits more when it’s blocked off time in their work calendar. This is exactly how I ended up ATV driving with friends. I sent a pre-read, reminders, calendar invite, and breakdown of charges they owed the following week.If you want to get really specific, I vote that you study the Agile or Scrum methodology.
Google Platform Certifications
My recommendation: Fundamentals of digital marketing from Learning Digital with Google
A must for anyone thinking of a career in marketing. It covers the basics, both in general and of the Google ecosystem. Also, it’s a nice certificate to post on your social media feed.If you still want to learn more from Google, pick out anything from their skillshop via Google’s own LMS to keep going.
Design in general (could be graphic design, photography, etc.)
My recommendation: Veerle’s Graphic Design Blog via Veerle Pieters’ own blog
but if you’re looking for something more practical, Canva Design School is the way to go
“But Justine, I don’t plan to be a designer or creative.” Neither do I. And I’ve tried multiple times to pick up graphic design but have consistently dropped it, and resigned myself to buying templates of anything I like. (Partly because I’m colorblind to orange, partly because I really can’t understand spatial reasoning.)
But I still recommend you take this so you know the vocabulary and how to form + vocalize your opinions on creatives’ work, especially if your chosen career path involves an agency or designer working with you. You don’t want to be the horror client who says “I don’t like the feeling of this poster.” What can they do based on that feedback??? Better to say “I don’t like the color palette and the emotions the model is projecting.” Creatives can work a bit better with that.
And if you’re planning on working in creative fields, then great, learn from people slightly ahead of you to get best practices quickly! I know nothing about the technical parts of this though.
Related: What was your internship hours and how’d you balance it with acads?[coming soon] my course on job hunting!
My recommendation: It doesn’t exist yet but when it does, I’ll most definitely update this!
July 2020 update from me: I’m taking a break from taking on new WWM-RC students because I’ve decided to develop the repeatable stuff I teach about job hunting into a course. It’s right now just a course outline, but I’m hoping that by September I have something I can show you as a preview.
[And if I finish it on time, I’ll also develop my mini-course on how to think and plan about taking a masters abroad that ultimately helps you land a job there.]
Exciting times!! Hoping I get it done ASAP!! Wish me luck!! And feel free to let me know what you think should be inside!! You can send me your thoughts at justine@thebumpycareer.com I will do my best to reply, but I will also disclaimer that I get easily overwhelmed by all the inboxes one has to maintain nowadays. Though I am young, I am not good at picking up new technology and maintaining a digital lifestyle.
If you’re interested in getting updates, and getting a free download of my “Job Hunting during COVID” checklist, you can join here.
A note before I end this post:
I also recommend that you explore whatever it is you’re interested in if you find you have a lot of free time right now or (if you’re like me,) you find yourself easily bored with the 5 apps we cycle through.
For me, that’s been costume design and fashion history.
If you’ll ever meet me in person, you can tell right away that I am not a fashionable person. And if we meet regularly, you’ll realize I don’t buy clothes often. When I do buy something, if I like it a lot, I’ll usually buy it in every color that suits me because I don’t like having too much to think about when I just woke up and need to go to work (ah, those pre-COVID days when this was such a chore).
Regardless, I still watch and learn about fashion history and costume design to understand concepts I’ll never encounter in my day-to-day life, for no other reason than I enjoy it.
So I hope when you are making decisions on how to use your spare time, you also think about what is it that you enjoy learning about. No point in us devoting the vast majority of our lives to work and making ourselves marketable for work, if we don’t ever get to enjoy the free time we have left.
Hi! I’m Justine.
I’m the founder and writer of all things in The Bumpy Career and welcome to Job Hunting, a slot where I share the life hacks and life facts I’ve learned over the course of my internships and job hunt. I hate that all the advice is either archaic, rude, or pretentious; job hunting’s hard enough as it is, older people don’t have to be rude about it. So that you guys don’t have to go through the terror of trial and erroring this stuff like I did, I made a whole category about it for you.
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