If you could take some classes in your field from Harvard, or Yale, or MIT, would they look good on your resume? That’s a definite yes, depending on your career plans. OK, any classes from those Ivy League Schools would impress a potential employer.
No matter what job you’re looking for, management, finance or business classes from the Wharton School of Business would give you an edge. Getting an undergraduate degree from any of those Universities would cost a small fortune, putting you in debt for years to come. But there is a way to attend these University classes and get a completion certificate at no cost.
The Business Insider recently listed 10 online courses you can take for free that can enhance your education and add value to your resume. If you’re in sales, credibility goes a long way to gaining a customer’s confidence and trust. Education experience from a prestigious college or university can open doors that might have been closed. Some courses are career specific, but many can be beneficial to sales professionals wanting to up their game.
Financial sales pros can take a course in Financial Markets from Yale’s Bob Shiller, Nobel Laureate in Economics. You’ll have to put in 7 to 12 hours a week, but this formal graded course will be something to refer to when talking to high-powered financial clients, and the certificate will look great in your portfolio or framed on the office wall.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business is offering a course in Gamification. How does that help someone in sales? Gamification explores the techniques from video game design that can be applied to other businesses, like managing people or solving business problems. And, you’ll have one of the hottest fields on your resume from one of the most respected business schoosl in the nation.
You can continue at Wharton with a series of courses in Corporate Finance, Operations Management, Financial Accounting and Marketing. If you think about it, these are all core courses for an MBA in Business. These free courses may not give you a degree at the end, but you will have had the benefit of learning with the top educators and thinkers in the country. And (pinch yourself) these courses are free.
If you have five to six hours a week, Duke University offers a course in How to Reason and Argue. Before you think this is about fighting and confrontation, it’s really about negotiation and persuasion, two key skills critical to success in sales. This course is about getting people to do things they may not want to do, a skill to have if you’re in management in a tough business market, which is the work environment in just about any industry.
Berkeley and Columbia offer courses as well. You can also learn the latest in industrial engineering, manufacturing and quality management from MIT courses like Lean Six Sigma Methods.
The courses are offered through platforms like Coursera and EdX, Udacity and ITunesU. Online courses take discipline and self-management. The courses take time and commitment to do the reading and complete projects. Courses can run for as much as 12 weeks, and vary in the number of hours required.
Education is what you put into it. Why spend this much time without getting the most education and learning as possible? It’s not just a line on a resume that looks impressive, but learning new skills and information that can put you on another level in your sales career.
Photo Source: Freedigitalphotos.net: Stuart Miles
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