Free and Paid Learning Resources to Bring Your Career to the Next Level

No job in the world depends on only one skill. And even if that was the case, to stay on top, you constantly have to improve that skill.

So where do you go to improve your existing skills or learn new ones?

One of the best things about the Internet is that there is no lack of places and websites to go to learn and in this article, we’ll show you some of the best free and paid learning resources to bring your career to the next level.

Best Job Search, Resume, and Interview Resources

TopResume

TopResume is a professional resume writing service that has already helped more than 600,000 professionals get more noticed by hiring managers and recruiters and land a job faster.

According to the company, having a professional resume increases the likelihood of getting contacted by recruiters by 38%, the chance to land an interview by 38%, and to actually land a job by as much as 40%.

The service offers:

1. Resume writing packages
2. Federal resume writing
3. Military transition resume
4. Academic CV writing
5. LinkedIn profile makeover
6. Top Interview expert coaching
7. Free resume critique

Price:

• Free Review
• Professional Growth – $149 or $14/month with Affirm
• Career Evolution – $219 or $20/month with Affirm
• Executive Priority – $349 or $32/month with Affirm

Glassdoor

Glassdoor is much more than a job search website. Its true power lies in helping you learn if you are undervaluing yourself by allowing you to compare salaries in your industry and research companies.

Price: Free

Career Cloud Radio

In his podcast, host Justin Dux, alongside his guests, which include HR professionals, recruiters, and other job-hunting experts, talks about how to truly excel at an interview and “win the hearts” of hiring managers.

Price: Free

The Voice of Job Seekers

Hosted by Mark Anthony Dyson, the TVOJS podcast aims to inform, educate and empower job seekers by providing valuable advice on how to build their resume and CV, prepare for an interview, as well as grow their online reputation.

Price: Free

Thomas Frank

With 2.45 million subscribers, Thomas Frank’s channel is one of the best places on YouTube to learn how to be productive, get career tips, find inspiration and motivation and, of course, nail that job interview.

Price: Free

CareerVidz

Getting tongue-tied at questions like “tell me about yourself” or “what motivated you to apply for this job”? Then CareerVidz is a great channel to check out with tons of answers to these and other questions hiring managers will drop at you during an interview.

Price: Free

What Color is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers

First written and published in 1970, What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles is a timeless classic and whether you are searching for a new job or want to change careers, this book is well worth a place in your library.

Price: $15.27 on Amazon

This is Who We Hire: Employers Review How to: Get a Job. Succeed in it. Get Promoted

Ever wondered why employers choose one candidate over another or what makes them promote someone over you? 

This is Who We Hire by Alex Groenendyk has those answers and will get you a peek into the minds of hiring managers and employers.

Price: $20.75 on Amazon

The Complete Resume, LinkedIn & Get Your Dream Course

It bears repeating. If you want your job hunt to be successful, you need to learn how to do it right.

This course by Chris Haroun will teach you how to build the perfect resume using the author’s proven format, do much better at interviews and get your dream job.

Price: $19.99

Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills

So you’ve impressed at an interview? Congratulations. Now all you need to do is negotiate the best deal for yourself.

Price: Free

General Resources and Learning Materials

Let’s say you are good at writing but would like to learn another useful skill like graphic design or Android programming. In the past, this was almost impossible to do. Basically, what school you graduated from, that’s the skill you’ll carry for the rest of your career.

Luckily, thanks to these online platforms and other resources, that’s no longer the case and today you can learn everything from management and leadership to playing the guitar.

Here are the best online learning platforms, courses, and other resources to learn a new skill:

Udemy

Udemy offers more than 185,000 online video courses in 100 different categories from web development to cybersecurity.

The biggest downside with Udemy is that it doesn’t offer a subscription plan or a free trial. Instead, you have to pay for each course individually and they range from $9 to $200. The good news is that you can cancel at any time and get a full refund within 30 days.

Price: $9 to $200 per course

Linkedin Learning

There was a time when LinkedIn was there to help people network, connect job seekers and hiring managers and develop their careers and not post quasi-inspirational quotes for the sake of cheap engagement.

However, those that are still serious about growing their skill and advancing their career can do so with LinkedIn Learning. Formerly known as Lynda, LinkedIn Learning has a library of over 16,000 online courses on all kinds of subjects from programming to economics and for everyone from beginner to advanced.

Price: 29.99 per month or $299.88 per year

MasterClass

Do you want to learn how to sing from Mariah Carey, business leadership from Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks), or how to write thrillers from Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code)?

Guess what? You can if you sign up for MasterClass. Although you won’t find that many courses compared to the other platforms here – only 150+), each course is taught by the very best in that field.

Price:

• Individual Plan – $18 per month (billed annually, 1 account, 1 device)
• Duo Plan – $24/month (1 account, 2 devices)
• Family Plan – $27.60/month (1 account, 6 devices)

Coursera 

Coursera offers more than 4,300 university-level courses and certification programs taught by professors from universities such as Duke, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and companies like Google, Hubspot, or Amazon.

In addition to the myriad of topics to learn about, Coursera is available in multiple languages, including English, German, Chinese, French, Japanese, Arabic, and so on.

Price:

• Coursera Plus Subscription – $399/year
• Individual courses – $29 to $99
• Specializations – $39 to $79
• Online Degree Courses – $15 to $25,000
• Professional Certificates – from $49

Edx.org

Founded by Harvard and MIT, Edx.org has a library of more than 2,500 courses and most can be taken for free (except for professional education courses.

Edx.org also gives certificates upon completing the course, but only if you enroll in the paid Verified Track Courses. If you want, you can also enroll in the Audit Track Courses for free, but then you don’t get certified.

Price:

• Audit Track Courses – $0
• Verified Track Courses – $50 to $300 per course

Udacity

At Udacity, you can learn in-demand skills that will get you ahead of the pack in areas such as coding, programming, data science, business, and more.

Each course takes between 3 and 6 months to complete and there are around 200 of them, plus over 40 Nanodegree programs, which come with one-on-one technical mentorship

Price:

• Nanodegree courses – Starts at $399/month for a 4-month course
• Around 200 free courses

Skillshare

Probably the most popular online learning platform out there, Skillshare has a library of 27,000+ courses in three categories: Build (Leadership and Management, Marketing, Freelance, Business Analytics), Create (Music, Creative Writing, Photography, Graphic Design…), and Thrive (Lifestyle and Productivity)

Price:

• $32/month or $168/year for the Premium Membership (full access to 27,000+ classes
• Free for the Free Membership (full access to 2,000+ classes)

Programming and Software Development

Knowing how to write code or develop an app is a very sought-after skill these days and offers plenty of opportunities for a new career.

The good news is that, while all that code and strings may look complicated to a beginner, there are plenty of tools and resources you can use to learn about it.

These include:

Break Into Tech

Let’s say you are coming into tech from a different career path. Break Into Tech is a great place to start for those who are looking to, well, break into tech. 

Created by a former Google and Apple employee (also a former kindergarten teacher), Break Into Tech has plenty of resources and advice to help you start a career in tech, including coaching calls and application reviews with Jeremy.

Price: $99 per course or $199 for all 3 courses

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

The best way to learn about coding is to practice, practice, practice. That being said, it’s useful to have a good base in theory and understand how code works.

This is exactly what Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold provides. This book, first published in 2000 and updated several times since will familiarize you with the concepts and rules of coding that you need to know before embarking on this journey.

Price: $21.98 – $26.71 on Amazon

Command Line Crash Course

Command Line Crash Course is just that, a crash course for beginners to learn how to use command-line interface and then move on to actual coding.

The book is great for beginners and someone who doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on courses (it can be finished in about a day), but don’t expect it to go too much into depth.

Price: Free

Pluralsight (ex Code School)

Pluralsight, formerly Code School, is a great online platform with hundreds of beginner, intermediate and advanced courses for software and web developers, data professionals, cyber security experts, and more.

Price:

• Standard – $19/month or $8.82/month billed annually
• Premium – $29/monthly or $13.26/monthly billed annually
• For Teams (2 users minimum)
• Starter – $33.25 per user per month or $399 billed annually
• Professional – $48.25 per user per month or $579 billed annually
• Enterprise – $64.91 per user per month or $779 billed annually

Programming Foundations: Fundamentals

Programming Foundations is a great course for absolute beginners to learn about programming. The entire course has 5 chapters, each with 5 to 10 lessons and a 10 to 15 questions quiz. The lessons are bite-sized, with most of them being around a minute to 3 minutes long.

Price: Free

Code Avengers

The best way to learn how to code is to actually sit in front of a keyboard and monitor and roll up your sleeves. 

Code Avengers is a very good place to learn how to build a website, an app, or a game or start a career as a web developer, web designer, or software engineer and learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Price:

• 1 Month Plan – $29/month
• 6 Month Plan – $25/month
• 1 Year Plan – $20/month

GitHub

Usually, when non-programmers think about programmers, they think of them as extremely secluded and loners. GitHub puts that notion on its head.

The whole idea of GitHub is to connect programmers and software developers and engineers, who can host and review each other’s code and build software. The platform has more than 83 million developers and contains over 200 million repositories

GitHub also runs the GitHub Learning Lab. However, it is shutting down on 1st September but you might still have time to sign up for and finish a course.

Price:

• Free – $0/year
• Team – $44/year
• Enterprise – $231/year

Mozilla Developer Network

MDN offers a ton of guides, references, and tutorials to help you learn the basics of coding, from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to more advanced languages and API integrations.

Price:

• Core – Free
• MDN Plus 5 – $5/month or $50/year
• MDN Supporter 10 – $10/month or $100/year

Codecademy

Codeacademy is just what it says, an academy for coders. You can join millions of others on the platform to learn a language from HTML & CSS to Ruby and Python, explore subjects like mobile development, machine learning, or cloud computing, or start building a career as a full-stack engineer, machine learning specialist, and more.

Price:

• Basic – $0
• Pro – $19.99/month or $15.99 if billed annually
• Teams – Get a Quote

Business Development

Business development is probably the most complex of all the career paths we have included here. If you want to pursue this career, you need to have good sales, marketing, communications, data analytics and analysis, project management, as well as business intelligence skills.

Since this topic alone could cover an entire article, we’ll just introduce one learning resource per each category we mentioned here. Also, we’ll cover marketing, particularly digital marketing, in its own section.

HubSpot Sales Blog

The HubSpot Sales blog offers a load of useful resources to learn about sales, including articles, videos, newsletters, podcasts, eBooks, and free courses.

Speaking of courses, HubSpot Academy offers courses in three categories: Contact Management, Inbound Sales, and Sales Enablement. There are, in total, more than 100 free courses in Sales, including 10 with certification.

Price: Free

Offline Marketing Foundations

Offline or traditional marketing still has its place and in this course, Brad Batesole, who successfully led teams at companies like Toyota, TMZ, LinkedIn, LegalZoom, and others for over 15 years, uncovers the secrets and tactics of traditional marketing, its pros and cons and more.

Offline Marketing Foundations is, in our opinion, an absolute must for anyone who wants to learn how to effectively use direct mail, trade shows, print ads, research customers, engage them through TV and radio ads and set up sponsorships and contests.

Price: $29.99/month or $299.88/year for LinkedIn Learning

Intro to Data Analysis

Data Analysis is an incredibly complex topic, which covers Statistics, Mathematics, Data visualization, SQL, Python programming, R programming, Machine Learning, and more.

All of this can be quite intimidating to get into for a beginner, which is why Intro to Data Analysis is a good place to start. This free course takes approximately 6 weeks to complete and will teach you how to pose a question, collect and explore data, draw your own conclusions from it and make predictions that are useful to your business.

Price: Free

Project Management Full Course: Learn Project Management In 8 Hours

In this 8-hour video, you’ll learn about the basics of Project Management, Project Planning, how to manage time for your projects, project management frameworks, how to use Trello, what Agile project management is, and more.

The video also covers PMP training and certification (PMP is the Project Management Professional certification by the Project Management Institute) as well as interview questions and answers at the end of the video.

Price: Free

bipp Tutorial

Business Intelligence is a field that uses services and software to turn data we gather from data analytics (see above for the best way to learn that) into actionable insights that inform your organization’s business decisions.

Since BI is hardly something that can be learned from a book or a quick course (although those can help too), the best approach to learning about BI and how to use BI tools are tutorials.

One such is the bipp Tutorial, which covers how to develop a Data Model, create a Visualization, develop a Dashboard, and more.

Price:

• Free – $0/month
• Premium – $10 per user/month
• Enterprise – Contact

Marketing Skills

This section, as we said, will cover specifically digital, aka online marketing. This includes SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and Social Media Marketing.

Learning SEO – A Roadmap with Free Guides & Tools

If you want your business to be seen on the Internet, you absolutely must know SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

Unfortunately, that’s a tall order for many as you need to know about keyword research, link building, content analysis and optimization, CMS, JavaScript, XML sitemaps, and much more.

There are a lot of books, videos, podcasts, and courses that cover all of these individually but to make heads from tails, start with this roadmap by LearningSEO.io, which includes free guides and tools for each phase of the SEO process.

Price: Free

WordStream PPC University

When it comes to PPC or Pay Per Click marketing, one of the best places to learn it for free is the PPC University by WordStream.

This covers everything from what is PPC, CPC, CTR, and CPA, how to calculate your conversion rate, set up a Google Ads account, optimize your Google Ads campaigns, and more.

Price: Free

Content Marketing Certification Course

The Content Marketing Certification Course by HubSpot Academy is a free learning course that every marketing professional or content producer should take (and complete).

The course includes 12 lessons including building a content creation framework, planning a long-term content strategy, generating content ideas, and promoting your content effectively.

Each lesson takes about 30 minutes, while the entire course is around 6 hours long (not including the time you take to practice what you’ve learned or read the extra materials).

Price: Free

Really Good Emails

Really Good Emails is a pretty good place to learn about it, plus get some inspiration (trust me, you’re going to need it if you want to do email marketing with any consistency).

Price:

• Free – $0/month
• Pro – $9/month (14 days free trial)

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners: Ultimate Guide for 2022

If you’re interested in Affiliate Marketing, then Shopify is practically a must-use. This ultimate guide for affiliate marketers explains how affiliate marketing works, what are its benefits, how to start, and so on.

In addition, each section has a few useful resources that you can check out to get a deeper insight.

Price: Free

How to Learn Social Media Marketing: 39 Resources for Beginners

So instead of giving you just one or two learning resources that may or may not work for you, here are 39 compiled by HubSpot.

This includes books, eBooks, podcasts, courses, videos, infographics, and much more. Go ahead and read it if you want to learn about SMM.

Price: Free

Writing

• 

Whether for business or personal, writing is a skill that you must learn and hone. According to Dr. Jordan Peterson, writing is the best way to learn critical thinking. Of course, Peterson focuses more on writing essays, but the principles he is talking about apply to business, creative writing, and more.

So how do you grease up those writing skills?

Practice

Look, writing isn’t just about putting words into order and making coherent sentences from them. You learn that in elementary school. To be really good at writing, you need to know how to convey your thoughts and ideas.

This is something that you can only do with practice. Did you think that Stephen King’s first book (Carrie) was a big success? No, the guy has been writing for 40 years and has penned more than 50 novels.

Price: Free (except for the paper you crumble in frustration)

Find a Writing Partner or Join a Writing Workshop

Look, if you are the only audience that is going to ever read your writing, that’s fine, but where’s the beauty in that?

Finding a writing partner or a writing group and reading them your first story, novel or a sales copy can be intimidating at first, but you’ll need this test (assuming they are honest with you) if you ever want to know if your writing is good or it sucks (don’t just assume one or the other).

Now, where to look for a writing partner or a workshop?

For a partner, look no further than a colleague who also wants to improve their writing. The two of you can thus help each other and point to mistakes.

For a writing workshop, check out Writing Workshops. This website includes online classes for both fictional and non-fictional writing, poetry, screenwriting, and more.

Price

• Writing Partner – Free, except for the occasional lunch or coffee
• Writing Workshops – Depends on the class, workshop, or seminar. Typically, a 6-week seminar is around $350-400

Leadership and Management

Some people are born with innate leadership ability. However, those are pretty rare. Most people have to be trained. 

The good news is that just like a very talented basketball player eventually fails if they don’t train and constantly improve their skills, so too does a leader who constantly works on this area outpace a “born leader”.

So let’s say you want to become a better leader for your team. How would you do it?

How to Find Friends and Influence People

First printed in February 1937, this bestseller by Dale Carnegie is still one of the most influential self-help and leadership books 85 years later.

Of course, the book was revised and updated several times (I own a copy of the How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age by Brent Cole), so you don’t have to worry if it’s still relevant (it’s just missing the section on marital satisfaction now).

Price: $10.60 on Amazon

Extreme Ownership

The best leaders show up in the worst of times and you can’t get much worse than a war. 

Extreme Ownership is a book written by former US Navy Seals Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, but you don’t have to wear a uniform to understand it. Instead, the principles in this book are more than applicable in everyday and business life as well.

Price: $29 on Amazon

EdApp Leadership Training Programs

While reading books on leadership is useful for getting into the minds of successful leaders, without putting those lessons into practice, they won’t mean much.

This is why we recommend taking a leadership training program like these 17 free and paid courses from EdApp. These include courses such as “How to be a Passionate Leader”, “Leadership Skills for Managers”, “Managing Social and Human Capital” and more.

Price: Free to $1,347 (most paid courses are between $35 and $100)

Finance

Do you know what is one crucial skill that schools utterly fail to teach us?

Finance, or more specifically, how to use our money so we have more and not less of it.

Instead, when it comes to investing money, taking loans and credits, and overall having economic security, most of us stumble in the dark.

Here are some good learning resources that can be the light in that dark though:

Personal Finance

The Khan Academy has many great courses in all areas of finance and economics, but before you go out and start making business finance plans, you need to set your own finances in order.

This course covers everything from how to save money or budget, how to invest for your retirement the right way, to understanding taxes and more.

Price: Free

The Ascent of Money

This book written and published in 2008 by then-Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, later adapted as a 4-part documentary for PBS offers a great insight into the importance of being financially savvy in the turbulent times that we are living in. 

Price: Free

Financial Literacy: Finding Your Way in the Financial Markets

For most people, the financial market might as well be a completely different planet. This course, by Professor Connel Fullenkamp, Ph. D. contains 24 lessons and will teach you how to navigate the financial market so you don’t get desperately lost in it, understand banks (and not fear them) and more.

Price:

• Instant Video – $234.95
• DVD – $269.95

Learn a Language

Hola! ¿Cual es tu nombre?

Nothing?

Learning a new language takes years sometimes, but it’s well worth the effort. Because without some knowledge of the language, you can’t fully understand other people’s cultures.

Luckily, you don’t have to take extra classes (though those could certainly be useful) to learn a new language. You can also use language learning apps and learn at your own pace.

Duolingo

First publicly released on 19th June 2012 (private beta on 30th November 2011), Duolingo today boasts almost 50 million active monthly users and has 106 courses in 41 languages, including English, German, Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Navajo, Haiti Creole, Klingon, High Valyrian and much more real, fiction, live or “dead” languages.

Price:

• Duolingo – Free
• Duolingo Plus – $6.99/month (same as basic Duolingo but no ads)

Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone is the longest-standing language learning website around and it can help you learn 25 different languages using natural language acquisition via repetition, voice recognition and visual cues.

Price:

• 3 Months (specific language) – €11.99/month
• 12 Months (unlimited languages) – €9.99/month
• Lifetime (unlimited languages) – €179 (paid once)

Babel

Finally, we have Babel. This is a subscription-based language learning platform designed by language teachers and experts (rather than crowdsourced like Duolingo). The number of languages isn’t that great (only 13), but it offers translations for all of them (unlike Rosetta Stone).

Price:

• Self-study app – $6.95/month or $83.40 annually
• Live online classes + Self-study app – $49.91.month  or $599 charged annually

Conclusion

Learning a new skill takes time. Perhaps years in some cases. Not to mention effort. But it pays dividends.

We hope this article can help you find a new skill that interests you and to learn it.