I’m always interested in learning new skills. Lately, I’ve been taking a course called Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design. It’s a career certificate offered by Grow with Google. They claim that after taking the course, you’ll be able to have the job-ready skills to be able to apply for jobs in the industry.
Grow with Google has several career certificate courses you can enroll in for $39 dollars a month. They give you a free 14-day trial. The courses are designed to take 3-6 months. The faster you go through the course the less money you pay. They have several interesting tracks such as Digital marketing and E-commerce, Android Development, and Data Analytics.
I’m really enjoying the UX Design course. It’s all about understanding the user of a website or app. It focuses on teaching you how to empathize with the end-user to make their experience better. I’m on week 4, and so far the course is focused on the theory behind UX design. I had thought that they would start us off by having us work on some example real-world design problems, but instead, we are learning about the thought process that goes into good design.
So far, the course feels like trying to learn how to ride a bike while reading about the theory and history of biking. It’s all very interesting, but to my mind, you’ve got to actually work on problems to understand them. I’m hoping that we get to real-world prototypes sometime soon, as the class is only 7 weeks and I’m over halfway through.
Grow with Google is impressive. They’ve also got an app to learn business skills called Google Primer. It has bite-sized lessons in marketing and entrepreneurship that you can do on your phone in small 5-minute chunks.
They’ve also got useful videos such as the ones linked below on how to learn new skills and find time to do it while working a full-time job.
If you are interested in learning a new skill, I’d recommend checking out some of these offerings.
Aaron Olson 