Introduction
I strongly believe, as some famous people have said, that investing in yourself is the best choice you can make in order to learn new skills and overcome your weaknesses.
Nowadays we are seeing a surge of online platforms and definitely users have more chances of learning something new and applying these skills. The times of having to go to physical classes is hopefully over.
Learning doesn’t necessarily mean studying or joining some classes. You can certainly learn new skills by listening, reading or observing how other people act.
Nonetheless, we are leaving these last actions for another post and in this article I’m introducing different courses that could be beneficial in your future.
Corporate finance – IESE Business School
I remember this was my first course at Coursera. I had also no clue about the finance world, and it opened many doors in future years. It is also the only course I have taken more than once since I really liked it how the teacher, Javier Estrada, explained the different topics clearly.
In this course you will understand how companies are financed to run their business and projects, how the interact with different actors of the global financial markets, and different formulas, etc. All in all, after course you will understand almost every topic you read in the financial news.
For some years, there was a huge demand to have Part II of the course and I saw it few months ago that there is indeed a second part. It is also part of the specialization Think like a CFO, which includes other 2 courses that are detailed better in the sections below.
You can find access to the single course or the specialization below.
Investment Management – University of Geneva
The investment management course is provided by the University of Geneva in collaboration with UBS. The specialization is composed of 4 courses, focusing on different finance topics. It starts with an explanation of how financial markets work, portfolio allocation, psychological topics that may impact our decisions
You will finalize the courses seeing other topics such as risk management, and new trends such as ESG, HFT or Robo-Advisors.
It is also interesting to see some real cases that occurred in the past, such as the Black Monday. It will conclude with a capstone project where you must define the portfolio of one of your clients.
If you are interested on switching to finance in your career, I would say that this is one of the best courses that you could start.
Foundations of Management – IESE Business School
I remember taking this course around the time I was promoted to Manager in a consulting company . As the title says, the specialization focuses on 4 pillars of corporate management and it is not entirely focused on finance. The 4 components that are taught in this MOC are:
- Accounting
- Finance For Managers
- Marketing
- Organizational Behavior
The first two courses are related to financial topics and how to understand the figures of companies, which is one of the most important things to make sure that they can work. These are also part of the CFO specialization mentioned before.
The last 2, are related to marketing strategies and management of people within the organization. Although they are not 100% related to finance, it is quite likely that they will play an important role future career.
Analysis of Business Problems. In this last course and it is a capstone project. There you will apply all the skills that you learnt with a real case from some years ago and the GasGas enduro and motocross brand.
You can find the 5 courses described above in the following link.
Financial Markets – Yale University
The last course in this list is probably the most famous one. If not, the teacher is probably you may have heard of because he is nothing less than the Nobel prize winner Robert Schiller.
Whereas the previous ones were specializations, this one is just a single course. However, it is longer than a usual course and it is divided into 7 weeks.
The purpose of the course is to go through almost every possible topic to understand the whole finance picture. Every week, there is a different topic and the ones below are the most important ones that are explained by Robert.
Corporate finance, insurance, different securities, bubbles, recessions, mortgage crisis (e.g., Case–Shiller index, derivatives, investment banking, brokers or new innovations in the future are some of the topics that you will observe in the series of lessons.
You can find more information about this below:
Conclusion
Nowadays, unfortunately for most courses you have to pay. However, if not mistaken, the one from Robert Shiller is still free. In any case, any of the 4 courses or specializations is totally worth it and you also have the choice of trying those for 7 days for free.
There are some topics to investigate in these links and I do not want to overwhelm you with too many courses at once. In a few weeks, I will introduce other courses that may help you in your professional future, but not necessarily linked to finance (or yes). In these cases, all of them are from Coursera, but in the future articles I will try to present other platforms.
In the meantime, happy learning!