“One of the best investments you’ll ever make is investing in yourself”. I received that advice many years ago and, whilst I thought it was just a sickly cliche at the time, I realised the wisdom of it as I became older.
In my experience, taking the opportunity to learn and pick up useful skills has been the best pound-for-pound investment I’ve made.
Whether it’s the WordPress course I took in 2010 that led to me making thousands of pounds in extra income; or sports coaching courses which enabled me to pass skills on to others, I’ve rarely regretted investing in learning.
Luckily, it has never been easier to learn or up-skill as it is now.
An online learning platform called Udemy is right at the front of this new wave of educational opportunity, and I’m going to tell you all about it in this article.
This isn’t a paid post. It’s not designed to be a sales pitch, and it doesn’t contain any affiliate links – it’s just something I believe in, and think more people should consider using. What follows is my honest review.
Udemy Courses – Empowerment through learning
I’ll be honest: I hadn’t heard of Udemy until recently. I first heard about it from lurking on Reddit forums. On several occasions, when someone asked what they should invest a small sum of money in, the answer was: “do a cheap course on Udemy”.
Being the band-wagon-jumper that I am, I had to find out more.
Lo and behold: Udemy is choc-full of quality, inexpensive online courses. And they cover virtually any topic you can imagine. Java programming; building a dropshipping empire; investment banking; programming; drawing; public speaking – you name it, Udemy has a course for it.
Udemy’s mission is pretty straightforward: to improve lives through learning. As they explain: “with access to online learning resources and instruction, anyone, everywhere, can gain skills and transform their lives in meaningful ways.”
It’s true, there are hundreds of opportunities to learn things on Udemy that could enhance your existing prospects. I know this, because I took the plunge and enrolled in one such course.
Choosing a course on Udemy – what do you want to up-skill?
As a first-time user of Udemy, courses are inexpensive. Accessing from the UK, nearly everything I saw was discounted to under £20, which is comparable to the price of a good book.
Working out what you want to learn is the first step. With so many courses, the choice is quite overwhelming.
Yes, you can learn just about anything on Udemy
Tempting as it was to enroll myself in “32 Footwork Dance Moves for Parties and Showing Off” or “Tantra for the Modern Man Who Wants to Excel in the Bedroom”, I took a much more sensible plunge with “Ninja Writing: The Four Levels of Writing Mastery”.
Even in the category of ‘writing courses’, there are dozens of options
I enjoy writing. I do a lot of it and I’d like to be better at it – both for personal and professional reasons. Taking this course on Udemy was the first time I’ve done any structured learning on the subject since my school days.
All Udemy courses are given a rating by those who have taken them and this helps in pointing out what’s good, and what to avoid. Over eight thousand people had given my course an average rating of 4.4 out of 5, so I was confident I’d be onto a good thing.
Generally, the people delivering the courses are true experts in their field. For example, Shani Raja, an ex-Wall Street Journal editor with decades of experience, delivered my course. A far cry from some of the chancers out there on YouTube. Having access to these people is an amazing opportunity.
Picking cheap courses on Udemy
After the initial discount available to new users, courses can increase in price quite dramatically. ‘Normal price’ for my writing course was £174.99 – not such a great deal.
However, Udemy frequently has flash sales, where you can pick courses up at a big discount. At the time of writing, that same course was just £14.99. It’s worth waiting to snap them up at opportunities like this.
It’s well worth waiting for one of Udemy’s many flash sales
Even at the discounted price, if you don’t like a course – for whatever reason – you’re covered by Udemy’s 30-day money-back guarantee. As proof this works, I asked for a refund after already completing a quarter of the course.
I’d have been happy to pay for the course on Udemy, but found the same course on LinkedIn Learning, which I get for free through work. So it made sense to ask for a refund and use my cash for something else on Udemy. Who knows, maybe I’ll use the money to take “32 Footwork Dance Moves for Parties and Showing Off” after all. But alas, I’m too old to care about showing off at parties and barely have enough rhythm to knock on a door.
32 Footwork Dance Moves that I may never be able to impress my friends with. A crying shame
The Udemy Course learning experience
Udemy courses are delivered mainly by pre-recorded video. Learners have high expectations so, for any course to achieve a decent rating, videos need to be well made and full of valuable content.
The Udemy course player is straightforward and user-friendly
Accompanying this, many courses provide additional downloadable material – such as worksheets or examples. Students can also ask the tutor questions and see other discussions.
Courses contain hours of content broken down into manageable chapters. You can consume this on-demand at your own pace, when it suits you. I found it best to wait until I could focus fully, making notes and trying the exercises. But you could quite easily do these courses on your phone on the bus to work.
Personally, I found the ability to speed the video up to be incredibly useful. I could comfortably take in some of the course content at 1.25x or even 1.5x normal speed. That allowed me to get through the course in a much more efficient way and left me wishing I’d had an equivalent option for all those dull university lectures that I sat through many years ago.
The speed-up option – so useful for cantering through dryer parts of the courses
At the end of the course you can print a certificate, presumably so you can make your mum proud. Ultimately though, the measure of success is how much you felt you improved. In my case – and I appreciate you may not think so – I felt like the course did improve my writing. What’s more, for the price I paid, it was very good value.
Is this the future of learning?
Having tried it, I firmly believe that Udemy is a fantastic platform for learning and it is capable of making a real difference for lots of people. Decades ago, if I’d had the opportunity to take some of these courses, it could have been a huge benefit.
When you see the power of what can be learned on Udemy and the price at which you can do it, it makes you question the traditional education model.
I would wager that there are university courses out there, charging thousands of pounds, that provide the learner with less value than a dozen Udemy courses that they could pick up for £20 each.
So if you’ve got a little spare cash kicking around, as well as the time and the enthusiasm to learn something new, I strongly advise you to consider a course on Udemy. Who knows where it could take you in the future.