Current Events > Does anyone have any experience with Google certification programs?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Namely, these:

https://grow.google/certificates/#?modal_active=none

I've been considering a career change and looking at going back to school. These programs seem to promise something significantly cheaper and faster than school, though, and in fields that I've been looking into anyway. Allegedly, they're a few hundred bucks, can be done in months, and are doable even if you don't have any experience in those fields.

But it kind of sounds too good to be true to me, so I'm pretty wary of actually trying them. Like, time and money are the biggest factors really holding me back from wanting to dive into school again, so something that allegedly cuts down on both sounds fantastic on the surface, but things that sound too good to be true usually are. I feel like there's probably some kind of catch, namely that I'm not really sure if an employer would really value one of these at all.

Does anyone have any experience with these and if they're actually useful and if they legitimately help you land a job afterwards? There's no real reason to bother if it won't actually help me, but they do sound reasonable at face value.

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They're frankly pretty much useless. The knowledge you can build is good but you get nothing in return for completing the course like a certification or diploma. Your money is better spent trying to get something with actual value that employers want to see.

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NinjaWarrior455 posted...

They're frankly pretty much useless. The knowledge you can build is good but you get nothing in return for completing the course like a certification or diploma. Your money is better spent trying to get something with actual value that employers want to see.

That's disappointing but not super surprising. It definitely sounded too good to be true, and I kind of figured that there was a catch in there somewhere.

My current degree (English, which is basically as useless as you've heard) just isn't doing it for me, so I'm considering grad school or something, but a cheaper way to refocus and look at a new career path sounded very appealing. It's a shame that it's not very valuable then.

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I guess I'll give this a quick bump just in case anyone else has any experience with these, even if the first response was pretty damning and kind of confirmed what I feared.

Or if anyone knows of any other similar "my degree sucks and I want to switch gears but ideally fairly quickly and with less of a financial investment" programs that I can look into that would actually lead to a job, I'd really appreciate it. I'm just really uncertain about going back to school due to the sheer investment involved, and if I could switch gears with a shorter term investment, it'd be fantastic.

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