It's all Upskill from Here

WORDS BY ANDIE WITTENOOM-LOUW

So you might be wondering why you should bother pursuing learning outside of an Abercrombie tutorial room on your own time? Up-skilling of your own initiative shows recruiters that you’re driven, ambitious and curious.

But you’re also a uni student and the income from your casual job can only cover so many skinny piccolos and Vietnamese baguettes from Taste. So how and where can you learn new things on the cheap or even better, for free?!

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Coding:

Ever since Karlie Kloss made coding cool, I’ve wanted to give it a red-hot crack.
Last week, I did the free ‘Intro to coding: HTML & CSS’ course and it was brilliant. Super engaging and quite full on, but has sparked my interest in furthering my coding capabilities.

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General Assembly also offers a free online course called Dash. They also have other (free!) courses coming up in Design Thinking, Cyber Security, User Experience Design, the list goes on.
 
It’s also worth having a look at Academy Xi, who have a mix of free and ticketed events and workshops - personally I can vouch that their Service Design Bootcamp is worth the $100, but they also have free weekly panel events with industry experts.

Employability skills:

Things get a little more complicated when it comes to organisations like Coursera and Skillshare, but free upskilling is still possible!
 
Coursera has a week-long free trial which you can use to access courses from world-class institutions like Stanford and Yale. I used my trial to smash through a course in Data Analytics from PwC but you could use yours for anything from Virtual Reality to Successful Negotiation skills.
 
Sure you have to input credit card details to access your trial but just add a cheeky reminder in your phone to cancel your subscription before you get hit with the $62/month.
 
Skillshare is also great, but how do they stack up to Coursera? They’re less of a time commitment and you don’t have to worry about cancelling a subscription. The free membership option includes anything and everything from an introduction to crypto-trading, how to create a killer elevator pitch and will even show you how to pickle like a pro (I’m not kidding, though you’ll need to sign up for a free trial for this gem )

USYD’s OLEs

The Sydney Uni Online Learning modules are relatively new and the zero-credit units are FREE for all Sydney students and staff. These are self-paced and on-demand and you can enrol yourself on Canvas. Upon completion, you get a nifty digital ‘badge’ which you can then add to your LinkedIn.
 
And what can you learn? Project Management, Design Thinking, Coding Literacy and The Global Ethics of Migration just to name a few. Check out the full list here
 
 
DuoLingo

Not much needs to be said about DuoLingo but I can’t stress enough the satisfaction that comes with learning a new language, let alone being able to use it in your day to day interactions. And you’ll be surprised as to how much you remember from Year 10 French.

There’s no time like right now to learn something new. It’s before semester kicks off, so it’s time to finally use that free month of access to LinkedIn Learning, book yourself into a session at General Assembly and download an app like DuoLingo.
 
You’ll enjoy it, I promise. Or at the very least you’ve earned yourself a new skill to finesse for your LinkedIn profile.