Google has a lot it wants to teach us. The search giant offers a massive number of online courses, many of them targeted to students or recent graduates through Grow with Google. Others will teach you programming languages or how to work with a specific technologies, or how to become an IT support person.
But there are some that can help any entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur, teaching you such valuable skills as how to create a product, get a startup off the ground, or perform app marketing. These classes, like many others, are all free. You can find most of them through Class Central. Here are a few of the most appealing.
If you’ve always wanted to launch a startup but aren’t sure how to get it off the ground, this course will give you a great overview. In it, you will write a mission and vision statement, learn how to find mentors and team members, and then learn how to find financing for your business and create a pitch deck that you can use to get customers or VCs on board. This self-paced course takes approximately three weeks.
This course is directed at those who want to create and launch an app. But from the description, it sounds like it would be highly useful for anyone doing online marketing–which is pretty much every business owner. The course takes approximately two weeks.
This course is targeted to people who want to create apps or free online content, and have them generate income. That may make it a little less useful for some audiences, depending on your goals. But the challenge of how to begin charging money for something that people expect for free crosses many industries and products, so even if you’re not specifically selling an app, it could be worthwhile. The course takes approximately one month.
Think you’ve got a great idea for a product? This course will help you refine your idea, create a mockup, design it quickly, and connect with potential customers to determine whether your product will be viable in the marketplace. That can save you from the heartbreak of pouring your heart and soul into a product, only to find out that no one wants to buy it.
This course is part of the entry-level Grow with Google curriculum. So if you’re a seasoned networker and LinkedIn user and are looking for some pro tips, this probably isn’t the right course for you. But if you wish you had a good elevator pitch that you could roll out with ease, if you think your LinkedIn profile and tactics could benefit you more than they currently do, or if you with you were better at making connections during networking events, then this course could be very useful. In any case, it takes approximately one week and has only one lesson, so it’s not a huge time investment. Oh, and it promises to teach how to write an email that gets responses. Now there’s a skill absolutely everyone needs.
