Coursera, located in California, takes great pride in being one of the best online marketplaces to get university-level education without stepping foot in an institution.
Coursera collaborates with several of the world’s most outstanding academic entities, including Yale, Oxford, MIT, and Harvard, to provide quality educational content to millions of its users.
But, aside from its popular appeal and hoopla, how useful is a Coursera certificate in terms of employability? Can you get a career by having completed one or more of the Coursera courses? What do Coursera employees think about Coursera? Read below to learn more about Coursera careers!
Can You Get A Career With Coursera?
The answer is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ thing as it really depends on many factors and variables. Coursera can certainly help you launch your career by giving you access to high-quality eLearning at low prices.
In addition, the Coursera certificates are extremely useful when looking for work. This is primarily because they provide an excellent way to demonstrate job-ready skill sets from a specific course you finished and graduated from. (See ‘Coursera Pricing – Is it worth paying for this course?‘)
Indeed, the online classes available on the platform can help you acquire the essential skills and competencies you need to embark on a new career, enhance your current skills, and boost your CV.
Many Coursera courses include a certificate of completion, for which most of the time you must pay for.
These accreditations provide demonstrable confirmation to potential employees that you have completed the necessary program to acquire the relevant skills or necessary qualifications.
These skill sets may then be applied in a current role to move up from, for example, a junior to a mid-level title or as a stepping stone to a different career path.
However, taking random courses or 101 courses related to a sector or industry you are interested in working in isn’t going to get you far.
How To Get A Career With Coursera
Study A Professional Certification Program Offered By Coursera
Applying for Coursera professional certification program is an excellent way to increase your chances of landing a Coursera course job
Coursera created these specialist-certified programs to enhance work placements at Coursera. (Check out ‘Are Coursera Certificates Worth It in 2023?’)
These courses offer training on specific jobs in companies like IBM, Salesforce, and even the previously called Facebook Meta.
With the necessary qualifications you can gain from these online courses, you might well be able to land an entry-level position in such companies.
They have received rave reviews, something that makes them quite worthwhile for entry-level employees seeking a career push.
Even so, the program you choose will also play a crucial role in landing a job.
For instance, if you want to work in data security, you can enroll in the IBM Cybersecurity Analyst Professional Certificate, which is available through Coursera.
Anyone considering a career in UI/UX can pursue the relevant Google UX Design Professional Certificate through the platform. There are also careers in data science, computer science, etc.
These professional courses last for a month and require a serious investment of both time and energy, especially when compared to the short courses offered on Coursera which can be finished in a few hours. They provide a great learning environment for ambitious individuals!
Take Coursera’s Professional Improvement Courses
Coursera also offers some courses designed by instructors that want to assist people with improving their job prospects in the marketplace.
There is a great variety of courses that can help you improve your skills and even acquire new ones that are useful in specific fields and sectors.
So, for instance, you can take the “Professional development: Improve yourself, always” course, with has a great rating, and can help you with the continued advancement of your skill sets and competencies by putting the emphasis on self-development procedures.
Visit The Coursera Careers Center
The Coursera Career Center offers several useful online leaflets with advice on things related to job searching, preparing for job interviews, as well as landing a job.
You can, for example, find information and guides on “How to Position Yourself for a New Career”, “How To Write An Effective Resume,” and even “How To Get Interviews.”
The best part is that all these guides are available for free, so you don’t need to even be registered on Coursera’s platform to access them!
Join Coursera’s Online Forums
The platform also hosts forums where people can start or join discussions and where you can find more information from people who have studied the courses you are currently studying or want to study, as tips and advice on how to overcome any future challenge in the job marketplace.
Explore The Coursera Career Options
Regardless of what your career objectives are, Coursera makes changing careers or making a fresh start one of the easiest things to do.
It does so by offering personalized step-by-step educational experiences in its Explore Career Paths section which you can find on your Coursera profile.
This page will advise you on which fundamental skill sets you need to acquire, what will be required to perfect these skill sets, as well as which classes to join on the platform and in what order.
These paths are not a day’s work, so you need to be determined to invest your time in getting to the end of them if you wish to excel in your career.
Coursera has deliberately done this so that learners can get in-depth knowledge of the work-related skills needed to impress their future employer and start a new career.
All the learning paths on the platform include:
- Online classes
- Professional certificates of completion
- Specialization programs
- Guided projects
How Can Coursera Plus Help You With Improving Your Skills
If you intend to study intensively, Coursera Plus can help you save money. But what is Coursera Plus?
Coursera Plus is an annual subscription that grants you access to all Coursera courses. With this subscription plan, you are also granted access to all materials and specializations which are often inaccessible in the freemium model.
Another significant benefit is that every course you complete will offer you a certificate of completion at no additional cost.
In comparison, if you join Coursera and not Coursera Plus, you will need to pay for a subscription month-to-month to be offered your certificates.
This monthly subscription might be relevantly affordable but getting the certification would then cost you more and depending on how long you study for and how many courses you complete, you will have to pay more money.
So, for example, completing 5 Coursera courses over the course of 5 months and getting all 5 certifications of completion can cost you anything from 400-600 dollars.
On the other hand, signing up for Coursera Plus means you only need to pay 400 dollars a year and get as many certifications as the courses you will finish that year.
If you are already employed and your company offers a budget for further training and learning, you can harness that opportunity to gain more knowledge and expertise in specific areas.
So, if you want to focus on improving your skill sets and do it quickly for a different job or a raise, you can enroll in many courses within the same subject area and enrich your CV with some important skills.
Do Employers Consider Online Education Important?
Following a survey held by Futurelearn that asked 1000 recruiters in companies based in the United States, approximately 44% of the recruiting executives rated online learning and completion of online courses as “very important” to “extremely important.”
Moreover, this survey revealed two key Coursera indicators:
- In comparison to the previous decades, people’s view of online learning and accreditation has improved significantly and is still improving.
- Hiring managers place a high value on the name of the higher education institution associated with a candidate’s online learning and training.
So, when it comes to Coursera, this indicates two things.
The first one is that the more hiring managers place greater importance on online learning, your Coursera certificates will most probably carry more value with each day that passes.
The second one is that owning certifications from platforms like Coursera which collaborate with highly regarded institutions can make your resume stand out from those of other applicants.
Hiring managers usually seek to find out every single detail of what prospective employees do to acquire new skills that are pertinent to their desired roles.
While Coursera certificates are not equal to the traditional Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees provided by universities, they demonstrate that a candidate is motivated to train, learn and become better at something.
This understanding may provide you with an advantage over similarly competent applicants, making Coursera courses and their certificates useful in that way.
To be more specific, companies appreciate candidates with Coursera certificates because they show them that:
- You have a strong record of goal accomplishment: 90% of those who join an online course do not reach its completion and give up halfway through or even earlier.
Therefore, completing your courses is great proof that you are a person that sets goals and does not give up until you achieve them. - You are passionate about your personal growth: Organizations hire practitioners who are driven to discover more and improve both soft skills and technical ones.
By joining Coursera classes, you can prove to a hiring manager that you are committed to self-development and helpful to their organization. - You have a thirst for knowledge: This is an attribute that prospective employers search for, especially in people who aspire to get employed in the technology sector.
Technological advancements seem to never stop happening, so it only makes sense that employers in the industry want employees that can adapt to new situations. - You have specific job-related abilities: Depending on the subject you study in your courses, your certificate of completion will demonstrate to a hiring manager what skills and experience you possess.
These skills can be both directly related to the job or be transferable. - You are willing to pay to learn: This might not be the first thing on your mind but hiring managers do take into account the fact that you were willing to spend money on Coursera to expand your learning and improve your skills or gain new ones.
As a result, we recommend taking courses on Coursera as the certifications of completion you can show to future employers and the skills you will have acquired from them are valuable to them.
Even so, you should not sign up for random courses just for the sake of getting these certificates.
Your primary objective is to learn more things and gain more skills that are relevant and applicable to the job you want to apply for.
This way, you will be able to nail your interviews by proving to the hiring manager responsible for the recruiting process that you are worthy of getting the job.
The Bottom Line
A Coursera certificate of completion is an excellent asset to include in your list of professional qualifications and credentials because it will make you stand out from other job candidates when looking for office or remote work.
Even though not all the hiring managers and employers in this world place the same importance on online learning certificates like the ones you can get from Coursera, they can demonstrate your genuine interest in gaining more knowledge and skills to become a top talent and more suitable candidate for this job.
They also show your drive and passion for the field and the job, as well as your ability to stay committed to your goals and finish the courses you sign up for.
By signing up for Coursera courses you can also work on self-development and complete specialization programs which will get you closer to your dream job in a specific business that offers them in partnership with this famous learning platform.
All this means that Coursera is a valuable online courses marketplace that, when harnessed in the right way, can get you closer to your desired career and even help you get that job you want!