If you ask me, you are never too old or too young to improve your professional skills. There is always something to learn to support your professional development. You can learn something new or specialize in something you are already familiar with.
If you’re not paying attention for a second, you risk missing an important update or new trend that will leave you behind. Especially nowadays, when technology is developing faster and faster.
Some employers invest time, money, and energy to support their employees with their professional development. But unfortunately, that is only a handful of companies. The majority don’t.
All the better for us is that there are a lot of free (online) learning platforms that can help you improve your professional skills and with that contribute to your professional development. All you have to do is invest time and energy in it!
Photo credits: Polina Tankilevitch (via Pexels)
What are professional skills
When it comes to professional skills, this refers to all the competences and knowledge that are necessary for the work you do. We can divide these into hard and soft skills.
- Hard skills: these skills are job-specific and are therefore also referred to as technical skills. Think of programming languages, medical procedures, laws, analytics, etc.
- Soft skills: these skills are relevant to different professions, and are also known as interpersonal and behavioral skills. They are essential to effective collaboration, career development, and overall success. Think of communication, teamwork, problem-solving, leadership, and time management.
Professional skills are not only about the skills you need in your current position, but perhaps also in the job you want to do in the future. By working on these skills, they contribute to your professional development.
Free online learning platforms
Fortunately, while many things cost money these days and are becoming increasingly expensive, there are still plenty of free ways to improve your professional skills.
Of course, you learn a lot on the work floor, from your manager and colleagues, but with these free platforms, it becomes even easier to work on your professional development.
Many of the online learning platforms in this article have a broad archive and are therefore relevant to different professions. However, there are also a few that clearly focus on a specific field or program.
Note: are you missing something in this article? Please let us know so this can be included.
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Blogs and newsletters
You are on such a blog at the moment. Because with Femmelution I hope to help you with your development, both in your work and personal life.
And there are countless other websites that can help you. Both with the development of you as a person and with professional skills and knowledge.
Websites not only do this by regularly posting new articles, but many of them also have their own newsletter. This allows them to easily keep you as a reader informed of the latest news.
By visiting websites and subscribing to newsletters that match your profession and interests, you can easily stay up to date about your topics of interest.
As I said, the amount of interesting websites is endless. Unfortunately for you, my two favorite websites are in Dutch. However, two others that I regularly check and are worth sharing are Forbes and HubSpot.
Coursera
If you are looking for online courses on Google, one of the names that pop up is Coursera. At first, they only seem to have paid courses, but they appear to have over 2,500 free courses. Lucky us!
With many different topics; from successful negotiation to statistics. And some are even courses organized by top universities.
The duration of the courses also varies widely. The shortest ones last less than two hours, while you also have courses of 3–6 months. So there is something for everyone!
Learn to code
As a teenager, I taught myself to code and made several web pages with it. But like most languages, if you don’t maintain it, you become less good at it. And so I unfortunately have to admit that I know very little about it now.
However, learning to code seems to be becoming more popular, and various platforms are responding to this. For example, SheCodes offers a free 60-minutes introduction class focused on women, and Codecademy offers a variety of free beginner courses.
It is never too late to learn a new language. Not even when it comes to one of the many coding languages.
If you want to learn the most commonly used coding languages, you should look at HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
If you want to connect and learn from people with the same expertise, LinkedIn is your place. Here you can follow people so that you can see their latest posts appear on your timeline.
LinkedIn has recently become an increasingly popular platform to promote yourself as a professional. As a result, you see that people here are becoming more and more active in sharing their knowledge and experience with the world.
Look at which people are relevant within your profession and the topics you want to develop in and start following them, or send a connection request (of course, with a message about why you want to connect).
Meta Blueprint
Here is yet another specific platform; Meta Blueprint. As the name already suggests, this platform is completely focused on the Meta channels, and therefore ideal for the online marketers among us.
If you’re just getting started with the Meta Channels, this place is a good starting point to get more familiar with the channels and backend.
But also for people with more experience, this can certainly be relevant to become even more specialized. There are a lot of different classes and different levels of experience.
(Online) Newspapers
One of the great things about the Internet is the accessibility of newspapers. Where you previously paid for your physical newspaper, many newspapers are now available online for free.
Of course, you see that certain articles are behind a paywall, but not all of them. As a result, they still offer a lot of information for free.
Depending on your field of expertise and interests, this can therefore be a relevant platform to obtain your information. Think for example of the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
Podcasts
Nowadays, the range of podcasts is so broad that there is something for everyone. From simple talk podcasts to motivational, inspiring, and educational podcasts.
The great thing about podcasts is that you can listen to them while you’re doing something else. Now, I don’t recommend listening to it while working or anything else that requires you to focus. But it’s ideal for a walk, a car ride, while working out, or just when you’re sitting on the couch.
You can find a podcast show for every expertise and interest. News, politics, finance, business – you name it.
Since my profession and interest lie in marketing, the educational podcasts that I listen to are mainly focused on this topic, but I also like to listen to some motivational podcasts.
This is a small selection of the podcasts I listen to regularly
- The Digital Marketing Podcast
- Brand, Market, Flourish
- The Blogging Millionaire
- The Diary Of a CEO
- Sports Marketing Machine Podcast
- The Science of Social Media
Skillshop (Google)
Do you or are you going to work a lot with Google products? Then this platform is for you!
Within the Skillshop you will find e-learning courses about the various Google products that you may encounter in your work. Including Google Ads and Google Analytics, and from beginner level to expert. There is always something to learn.
TED Talks
TED has the mission to discover and spread ideas by organizing multiple TED Talks throughout the year. For these talks they invite some of the most inspiring people around the world.
The themes and knowledge of these speakers are extremely broad so that everyone can find something interesting in their online library. And believe me, the selection is endless!
With videos about productivity, public speaking, marketing, leadership, innovation, and much more. You can always find something that might help you in your professional development.
Udemy
Just like Coursera, Udemy also has a wide range of courses. Although their free library isn’t as big as the one from Coursera, with almost 500 free courses there is still a lot to choose from. Besides that overview, you can also set the price filter to “free” when looking into specific categories.
Especially within their free Productivity & Professional Skills courses, there are a lot of relevant courses to work on your professional development.
YouTube
In the beginning, YouTube was mainly seen as a channel for vloggers and funny videos, but nowadays you can find much more on it. From motivational speeches to tutorials on a variety of topics.
Especially the tutorials can be very valuable when it comes to improving professional skills.
Do you run into a certain problem in a program you work with or do you have to learn a new program? Chances are there’s a video on YouTube that can help you!
When it comes to blogging, I have a few go-to accounts. Analytics Mania helps me to understand Google Analytics 4, with Neil Patel I try to step up my SEO game, and Jamie Marsland keeps me up to date about the latest WordPress news and other WordPress-related tips and tricks.
And there is so much more! Another favorite of mine and worth mentioning is Erin McGoff. If you need any career advice, this is your account.
Improve your professional skills today
Do you already have a professional skill in mind that you want to improve? Hopefully one of these learning platforms can help you!
It is also good to know that your professional development does not have to take that much time at all! For example, read 1 article per day or listen to a podcast episode on your way to work. Don’t make it too difficult for yourself.
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