How New Yorkers Can Get 4,000 Coursera Courses For Free
By: Frederik Bussler
Tags: News, Coursera, Education, Course, Learning

How New Yorkers Can Get 4,000 Coursera Courses For Free

And why it’s worth it.

3.5 million New Yorkers lost their jobs as of October 2020, and barely half of the working-age population is employed.

Many of these jobs, especially in retail, aren’t coming back, while high-wage job postings are way down. With a tougher job market than almost any time in history, job-seekers need to upskill to have a chance.

Working at an AutoML startup, Obviously.AI, I’m particularly interested in the variety of AI and analytics courses offered, but there are opportunities for practically every field.

New York Department of Labour & Coursera Partnership

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently announced a new online training platform for unemployed and underemployed New Yorkers to learn new skills — at no cost. Through a Coursera partnership, almost 4,000 online programs are offered.

“The war against COVID-19 is one taking place on multiple fronts, and while we are doing everything we can to protect the health of New Yorkers, we must also take the steps necessary for building back a strong economy” — Governor Cuomo

Underemployment is simply when you’re working in a job you’re overqualified for. It’s expected that this partnership will save New Yorkers millions of dollars. Unemployed and underemployed New Yorkers can apply here.

Coursera Workforce Recovery Initiative

This partnership is one of many within Coursera’s Workforce Recovery Initiative, which has helped over 330 government agencies across 70 countries provide workers with relevant job skills training.

Since launching, over a million workers have enrolled in more than 7 million courses. This initiative is modeled after a successful program that was launched in March to give free courses to nearly 4,000 colleges that closed their campuses.

Why It’s Worth It

There’s a huge debate around whether online certificates are worth it. Indeed, some employers and universities don’t care much about a certificate — but they do care about the underlying skills you’ll learn.

Moreover, employer surveys show that almost all employers value IT certifications at least somewhat.

Also, many will say that you can learn practically any Coursera skill on YouTube or Wikipedia anyway, which is partially true, but there’s little organization or structure to keep you on track with those alternatives.

Coursera is a great way to learn skills from Ivy League universities to tech giants like IBM and Google.

Certificates Aren’t Everything

With that said, certificates aren’t the end-all-be-all — they don’t provide any guarantees of employment, nor are they alone sufficient to make your application stand out.

Build a Portfolio

What you can do to make your profile stand out is to apply the skills you’ve learned and built a portfolio around them. A portfolio is anything that proves your worth.

For example, if you’re looking for marketing work, you might write articles on Medium and other publications. If you’re looking for programming work, you could build up your GitHub profile. If you’re looking for web dev work, you might build up your WebFlow and Dribbble profiles.

As a marketer, my portfolio is straightforward. Most of it is in my LinkedIn bio:

200+ published articles from Forbes to Yahoo to Hacker Noon

5 million+ views on LinkedIn alone, including posts with 12,000 comments

22x speaking engagements including Fortune 50 keynote

Top Writer in Artificial Intelligence on Medium, 1.6K followers

Nominated as Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year

Towards Data Science articles with 300K+ views

Most Retweeted, Most Favorited, and Most Viewed content on KDnuggets

At the same time, I feature many certificates, recommendations, and skills on my profile while actively engaging with my network.

Summary

In short, this is an amazing opportunity that millions of New Yorkers should take advantage of, keeping in mind that certificates alone won’t get you a job.