Skills or Certificates?

Amidst lockdown, you must have come across various advertisements, videos and posts concerning online courses being offered. Some of these online platforms were-

• Coursera

• edX

• Canvas

• Iversity

• Udemy

But did you ever asked yourself, what is the purpose of learning anything?

Is it something that you want to prove to others, or you really want to learn it because it would improve you, over yourself?

Read that last line again.

Most of us are running towards the same goal, i.e. - To learn something as it will add up to our skills, which we could later use to impress others (maybe in our job profile). But do we actually sit down to learn something because that would upgrade our skills, our learning, which is not to impress anyone else, but to actually widen our horizons of knowledge?

Out of all the online courses and certifications I’ve researched, there are tons of them which are paid and are even worthy enough. But some of them are free as well. But there is a third variety as well, the ones which are free to learn, but will charge you some amount if you want a certificate.

Now, there would be many of us who’ll drop out of it because you’ll see no point in learning something which doesn’t provide a certification for the same. We all fail to see the benefit of learning a skill here and are concerned about a piece of paper.

Let me give you an example - Suppose you have an interview at your dream firm, and the interviewer is viewing all your certifications in your Cv and suddenly asks you something which might have skipped out of your mind at that moment due to the pressure of landing a job (We all have an adrenaline rush when we’re this close to our dream firm/company). What’s the point of that certification now?

We need to understand the importance of knowledge and skills over certifications. Go out, research. Find something that you really want to learn and trust me you’ll find n number of ways to learn it for free and there are chances that you’ll be way better at it than anyone who might have paid for the same.

It’s all in the hunger of knowledge, and knowledge has got no boundaries. It’s endless.