If you’re looking to develop your skills and improve yourself, then taking an online course is a great way to do so, and when it comes to applying for new roles after taking these courses, you want to make sure that potential employers are aware that you’ve completed these online courses, especially if they’re in a topic or field of expertise that the employers are looking for.
Completing an online course in relevant skills is one of the best ways to help you stand out amongst the competition and demonstrate your commitment to your professional development.
However, if you’ve yet to add your online course certifications to your resume, it can be difficult to figure out exactly where you should place them in your resume.
You want to try to ensure that the details of your online course certifications are in an organized format so that your interviewer can see that you’re qualified in those areas.
So, for a guide on how to list online courses on resume examples, as well as more information surrounding online courses, then keep reading onwards!
What Is An Online Course?
If you’ve never heard of an online course, or have heard of them but simply have no idea what they mean, then allow us to explain to you a little bit more about them.
Online courses are a form of training that you can undergo online in order to help develop or gain new knowledge and skills.
Sometimes, these online courses may be referred to as MOOCs, or Massively Online Open Courses.
Online courses tend to be affordable, which makes them extremely accessible and convenient for people wishing to learn new skills from home.
There are also a range of free online courses you can undertake, although the topics and subjects that these courses tend to cover are usually more generalized, and there’s a chance that they won’t provide you with any official certification of completion either, so if you’re looking for a course that is going to help you gain a specific certification, there’s a chance that you’ll need to find and pay for that specific course.
As you can see then, there’s no doubt at all that taking an online course can be extremely beneficial to someone who is wanting to further their skills and career, which is why so many professionals are flocking online to complete these courses.
But, there’s no point doing them if you don’t know how to display them on your resume!
Why Add Online Courses To My Resume?
If you’ve completed a few online courses, and you’re now looking to put your newfound skills and knowledge to use in a new job role, then you might perhaps be wondering whether or not you should add your certification of your course completion to your resume, because as long as you’ve got the knowledge, that’s all that counts, right?
Well, not quite, and there are a whole host of reasons why you should ensure that you list your certifications on your resume, such as:
Demonstration Of Development
When you choose to opt into online courses that will help you develop skills and gain knowledge, not online does it help you learn more about specific subjects, but it’s also a demonstration to all of your potential employers that you are dedicated to developing yourself professionally, and are willing to seek out additional training and education to do so.
Some online course certifications will even help you to demonstrate to your employers that you’re capable of filling a specific position entirely.
Filling In Career Gaps
If you’ve been out of work sometime, or recently graduated from college or university and haven’t been able to find employment in the meantime, then actively going out of your way to complete online courses shows that you have been proactive and willing to continue to further your education and skills with your free time.
So not only were you actively seeking employment, but you were also enhancing your knowledge and skills in order to prepare yourself for prospective new roles.
Differentiation
The job market is an extremely competitive place, and can be particularly brutal to those who find themselves lacking professional experience or those who are fresh out of college.
This is why actively taking and completing online courses is an excellent way to help differentiate yourself from other people who are applying to the same roles that you are.
Having a specific course certification on your resume might just prove to your employer that you’re the more knowledgeable or skilled person for the role, and it might just be the reason they pick you over someone else!
Helping To Tailor Your Resume
Tailoring your resume is a skill all of itself, but it essentially involves you incorporating keywords from the prospective job description into your resume to demonstrate that you’re the best candidate for the role.
For example, some employers may include a list of training requirements or certifications needed in order to qualify for the role, so having an organized and well-presented list of the certifications you’ve gained online is an excellent way to incorporate those keywords into your resume.
How To List Online Courses On Your Resume?
When it comes to ways of incorporating the courses you have completed online into your a resume, then there are a number of ways that you can do this, so if you’re unsure on the best ways to do this, then simply follow some of the steps below, and you’ll have an impressive looking resume in no time at all!
Keep It Relevant
When you have a list of online courses of all your online course certifications ready to add into your resume, it’s a good idea to consider the relevant courses before you go ahead and add them in.
Depending on the job search and the role you’re applying for, you might want to add or remove certain online course certifications in order to best cater to the responsibilities of the role that you’re applying for.
So, if you’re applying to work in a role in the computing industry, you’ll definitely want to include the certifications in the online courses you completed on cybersecurity, but maybe leave out the certification of the sociology course you completed just because you were bored.
It’s also worth noting that if you’ve completed a course at multiple different levels, then there’s likely no need to mention the completion of the earlier stages of the course, simply mentioning just the higher-level certifications and courses that have you completed will be enough to impress most employers!
Choosing The Placement
One of the choices you’ll have to make when it comes to including your online course certifications on your resume is where exactly you’re going to place them.
The first option would be to include them alongside your other academic achievements in the education section of your resume, but you should ensure that whatever your highest academic attainment is, for example, your college degree, remains prominent at the top of the list.
This is because whilst many employers will find your dedication to progression and development impressive, they’re first and foremost looking for confirmation that you have a high enough level of education for the role to begin with, before they begin to look at any additional certifications you may have attained since your education.
In addition to this, it’s worth noting that you should absolutely differentiate between completing an online course that has been offered by a university, and attending that university as a student full-time because the likelihood is that the certification provided by that university’s online course is not going to be the same certification as a full degree from that university would be.
So, if you undertook the reputable online classes that were run by a college such as MIT, then you would need to make it clear that what you did was simply an online course, as opposed to an actual degree.
This will help to prevent whoever is evaluating your application from making any mistakes or misunderstanding your level of education.
If you’d prefer, you could always include an entirely new section on your resume specifically to highlight your certifications gained from taking online courses on a resume, and although everyone’s resume is going to look different from one another, it’s best to keep this section as close as possible to your education section as possible, as this helps to keep your CV coherent and understandable.
When creating this section, you’ll want to ensure that you give it an appropriate title, something along the lines of “Professional Development”, or “Professional Training”, should be suitable for whatever certifications you have.
Listing
Once you’ve chosen the perfect spot for your online course certifications to be listed, now it’s time to actually list them.
But there is a rule that you should follow when it comes to listing your certifications, and that’s to list no more than 5 of them on your resume, as including more than this will likely bore the reader.
You’ll want to ensure that your resume certifications are listed precisely as they appear online because employers are likely to use the name of the relevant certification to ensure that they are valid and real.
You should also provide the company or organization that provided the online course too for your employer to check.
You’ll want to ensure that you take your courses from reputable and legitimate sources because it’s not uncommon for employers to check with the providers to ensure that they have the correct accreditation to be providing the course in the first place.
Dates
When it comes to including the dates for your courses, you only need to worry about including the date that you completed the course and gained that specific accreditation.
If you happen to be undertaking a course but still want it to appear on your resume, then simply include “in progress” next to the title and the provider of the course, along with the date that you’re expected to finish the course too.
The dates will help to demonstrate to your potential employers just the relevant coursework section is.
For example, an online course in a field as volatile and ever-changing as cybersecurity from five years ago probably isn’t going to be as relevant or up-to-date as one that was completed this year would be, so you should be wary of that when it comes to listing your courses.
Summarize
After you’ve listed each one of these courses, you’ll then want to go underneath each one and provide your employer with just one to two bullet points about what you learned from undertaking this course.
This will provide context for those not familiar with the course, and will help the hiring managers to understand exactly what you know and are educated on.
These will also help when it comes to the interviewing process should the interviewer ask you about them, as they can serve as a starting point for summarizing your knowledge and education.
Examples
If you need some guidance on what your examples should look like, then take a look at our two examples below!
In Your “Education” Section
Education:
Bachelor’s degree in (subject) – University of (Your University) (20XX – Year of Completion)
Provider of Online Course
Used online courses provided by an accredited source to undergo a series of courses to help develop my professional skills in (course subjects).
Course Name #1
Learned how to do … in order to… and to…
In A Separate Section
Professional Development:
Provider’s Certification of/in (Year of Completion)
Learned how to… including skills such as…
From this course I… and developed…
Summary
As you can see, adding your professional certification can be extremely helpful when it comes to applying to new roles, and can make all the difference between you getting turned down, or being selected for the role!
We hope that now you have an idea that how to list online courses on resume examples
