Courses, Clubs, and The Power Of Plugging-In To Achieve Mastery-Part One-
The internet has become an all-you-can-eat buffet of post-college extracurricular lectures. Most of them are pre-recorded by well-known teachers, creatives or, in the case of the MasterClass, celebrities. There are well-known platforms, like Coursera, The Great Courses, SkillShare, and the aforementioned MasterClass. But should you be taking these self-paced leisure courses or self-paced courses honored by colleges like Sophia? What about free massive online open courses? Do jobs care about any of these internet lectures, or should we be paying attention to tech certifications like the ones Google started offering? If we had a battle of bands for internet courses, which of these would actually make you a better person, help you achieve your goals, and bring you closer to self-actualization?_________________________________________________________________________
This episode will be part one of a two-part exploration of a la carte education. In next week's episode, we'll take a more holistic approach to post-college self-education. Do we really need another online course, or are we really craving something else? But today, we get to tackle the online courses themselves.
Myth One: Which jobs allow a SkillShare class on their application? Which state colleges honor Coursera? Do any of them?
Joe: Todd and I get asked to do a presentation sometimes.
Todd: Well, once a week.
Joe: Yeah, and they're usually about how to build a podcast, often about storytelling structure. But we had a presentation where we shared our behind-the-scenes process on how to write and prepare for episodes. And I had a therapy appointment at the same hour; They overlapped by about 30 minutes. And so, I told Todd instead of us both presenting while doing a comedy duo like we usually do, I would do the first 30 minutes and then leave. You do the second 30 minutes. Todd, how did those last 30 minutes ago?
Todd: Well, this is the problem with this old ducking out on old Todd middle of a presentation. Joe and I have very distinct different jobs on this podcast, and we don't really bother the other one about what they do because we don't have the skill set to really give them feedback or criticize them. So, Joe did a good job getting it started, and it turned out fine. I was a little nervous being alone because we’ve done the show for so long, we kind of answer each other's thoughts and questions.
Joe: Yeah, you do jump in quite a bit while I'm presenting.
Todd: Because you're losing the crowd; I can see the eyes glazed over, so I got to make the story violent so we can save the presentation.
Joe: It was on Zoom. I could see somebody pulling up their sleeping bag and crawling it. I know that was happening. But you told me something afterward, which I did not know because I didn't give anyone else a chance to talk. Everybody on that call had tried to start a podcast. Is that right?
Todd: That's right. And if you're flailing badly in a presentation, just go to question and answer because people love to hear themselves ask questions and speak, and that's what's interesting about this. We were doing a presentation of people who wanted to do their own podcast. What I didn't know until after the question and answers was these people had already tried and struggled in their journey, and that's why they were there. So, they were really leaning in. They were listening extra hard because they had those pitfalls, and they wanted to fix them to do their own show.
Joe: Also, shout-out to Nate if he's listening. One of the people in our presentation class messaged us back about how they got themselves into a multimillion-dollar podcast deal afterward. Now, we can't take credit for that. We're not directly mentoring him, but I'm going to put that on my resume anyway.
Todd: Congratulations, Nate!
Joe: But yeah, we want to talk about extracurriculars today as adults. We generally use the term extracurricular activity for high school and college. But honestly, every adult I know and hang out with, they do things to improve themselves. They do things to hone their craft to pad their resume, to make themselves a more viable job candidate or in my creative circles, do it because they want to be better at what they're doing. I took every MasterClass about writing at some point. So, how helpful is that? What about going to a club in person?
Todd: That's also the difference between going to college or learning online – is that the same experience as sitting in front of her professor or meeting the camaraderie of your other fellow students? Are you missing out on 75%? I know you're missing something. Just how much something is the question.
Val Kilmer and Robin Williams had both gone to Juilliard College. I watched this documentary on Val Kilmer, and it's just a good show called Val. I thought of Robins Williams is just being this natural goofball, I didn't think he went to a premiere Harvard-like art school. I assumed he was the funny guy on his work crew and figured out how to make jokes with everybody and eventually got into comedy. I don't know why I assume that but that's effectively what part two is going to be about for this podcast. in part two, we will talk about what is the benefit of showing up and being around a pool of people who are just as talented as you and are competitively trying to improve.
Now, going to start with the part where Todd and I may have had some experience, which has to do with all these online extracurriculars. There are so many different avenues of self-improvement and self-awareness. So, we're just going to talk about the bread and butter of the extracurriculars, what will actually get you more money. What will improve your life? Are they worth ten times what you paid for them or are they just a total waste of money? Todd and I both have experience, and we're going to start with MasterClass. There have always been leaked textbooks from as far back as the internet existed; there have always been instructional videos on home improvement and ways to improve yourself, but they went from VHS to now YouTube. Now, MasterClass sounds like rounded college courses, but I'm going to pull from The Atlantic, covering where MasterClass came from. And the name of the article is, What Is MasterClass Actually Selling, and they talk about how the origins of caster class the person who founded it was trying to as he put it - democratize access to genius.
Now, there are lots of celebrities and there are legit geniuses on MasterClass. These are people who are at the absolute top of their field, but the issue with MasterClass, as they point out in the article, is everyone jumping into it at a very wildly different skill level. If MasterClass was selling classes that were tailored to whatever your field is, they would have to set a bar. So, what masterclass tries to do is they try to have a system where it doesn't matter what your skill level is. When you first jump in, you can still listen in, and you can still learn something. That also means that they're not going to be able to help you progress. I'm going to use a quote from Atlantic Herring because I think they did such a great job. They said that MasterClass seems ideally suited to frustrated 30-somethings for whom education does not necessarily result in upward mobility or even a job. So, they kind of know that you're going to come into it. You're going to be curious and interested, but you're not going to walk away with skills. You're going to walk away with motivation. And that's really what I got from this experience.
Myth Two: I paid for the MasterClass. So why aren't I a master yet? Did I waste my time?
MasterClass kind of launched when there was hype around like online education had kind of fizzled. On YouTube, you can see these hour-long courses show up. And they're interesting. They're like, here's how to start a career in computer engineering or here is something very interesting but it's got a narrow appeal and it's for class. The problem with the massive open online course is that you don't get credit for it. You can sign up and get a certificate, but they are free classes you just watch. It's almost like crashing and sitting in the back. Unfortunately, I think that MasterClass does even less for you because a massive open online course is at least designed to initiate you into a series of classes or a career trajectory masterclass. I'm just going to again, quote the writer: a platform for dispensing assorted self-help and self-development bonbons for the young capitalist driver.
Do you think there's any such thing as getting a certification learning something? Or do you think you have to quickly transition to either the next level of that education or using in your day to day at work? I think that an online class will fall into one of two categories. It is the background information of my life; I know that I will never use that in my life, and I won't have to reach for it very often. So, it goes into the background fuzz of my knowledge. Whereas online writing courses, I will pay close attention because I know that I'm going to transition that into doing it and plan for that. If you believe the same, you have to plan to apply it. Otherwise, it becomes part of the background fuzz almost immediately. If you watch two or three-hour-long classes on something, it starts to fill out your understanding of how it works as a field but it by no means prepares you for it.
After reading this article and reading about the founder of MasterClass and figuring it out behind the scenes, I think they know that nobody is walking away from here as a master writer or master decorator. I think they know they're providing entertainment. There are millions of people in this country that love to learn. They just like experiencing new things and getting smarter even if it doesn't leave to a new job or a bump in pay, which this would be good for. Now, If it sounds like I'm disparaging MasterClass, the Chris Voss Negotiation class was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I would have paid for and retaken the course just for that. If you look at it as entertainment, not something that will help you get a job and not something that will put you up to a better level in your field, you'll be fine. It'll be entertainment, but it's not going to be what we're talking about today.
Myth Three: What's the difference between a club and a course? Why do colleges consider high school debate club money in the bank on an application, but the debate MasterClass earns you a shrug?
If we talk about extracurriculars, it is not up to par with drama club or chess club. It is just not going to give you skills. It's going to interest you, which there's a value in that. I've taken more online courses than I have gone to clubs or done things in real life. But I wish I had done more in-person stuff. I see the value in online, especially because I've been a night worker for 15 years. So, my best option is to fill my head with knowledge from online. But the thing that seems to grant so much benefit is an in-person club. And that's what part two is going to be about. Just to briefly say it, chess masters didn't take an online course or read about game theory and then just become a master. They took that information directly to a club. They had to play against other chess players. And why would we assume anything about online education would make us more masterful without playing the game? Whatever your chosen game is.
Have you ever taken an actual for credit online college course? They are pretty dense. But what I found surprising is you can almost take it like a podcast. If it isn't a higher course, then you might be in a class of 30 or 40 people, in which case you get into side chatter by students, creating discords, or you get into the class is small enough to where a teacher will call on you. But most classes that I've seen, you are sitting in a zoom class of like 100 to 300 people - so you can basically just like listen to it like a podcast and take the test at the end. But honestly, it's not that much different from what some of these course classes were going to be talking about. That said, would you like to hear about which of all of those opening course systems are actually worth something like tangible immediate job-based monetary will get you a degree, or will it get you paid?
What we're going to be looking at are the two questions we're asking for each one of these. Is it credited for college, and second, how does it look on a resume? So, we will go through these basically one at a time. We look them all up for the show and we're going to talk about them right away. We're going to say this is not for the entertainment factor. We are not considering whether it is interesting. These are strictly, it doesn't get you college credit, or does it get you a green checkmark on your resume. So, we'll start with Coursera. Coursera is one of the big standards right now. It covers mostly data science, business, and health. Is it accredited? No, it's not. However, this is going to be an asterisk.
On this one, many of the classes from Coursera are taught by Yale and Stanford and the University of London and real colleges. So, if you're already enrolled in a college, you can petition your academic advisor or the Department of Education and ask if it can count toward credit. Coursera does allow you to get a little certificate at the end saying that you took it. It doesn't necessarily mean that you got tested, like most classes where the big thing at the end is the final quiz. If you're going to take math classes, go through Coursera so you can do it at your own pace. But if you're taking it hoping to get college credit out of it, go to your college and ask first.
Now, there's another big name - The Great Courses. I have not taken any of the Great Courses, but I do know about them because they are at the end of every YouTube video that has anything to do with education, self-improvement, or anything that is niche. To our metric, no, they're not accredited, and no, there are no quizzes or projects. So, it can't even possibly be graded. Again, they may have very interesting material. Their ads may be correct, but I've never seen these courses put on a resume unless it was highly specific to the job. They don't generally look huge on a resume, but they are more like a flexible platform. They seem to be a little bit more open and flexible with what they have on their platform.
Now we are now into actual college material. So, if you need to pick up some college classes, Sofia is the one that I was pointed to by college. Are they accredited? Yes, but it's complicated. Sofia themselves do not offer degrees. They are more like a study hall for basic college classes; their courses are recommended by the American Council on Education, meaning there are a lot of colleges that actually accept them as full credit. They straddle the line between a prep class and basics. Have you heard of the Google certifications that came out last year? You can get certain ones that will help you get a job at Google, a very high-paying job.
We have an episode about Elon Musk and college degrees. And in that episode, we said that most hiring managers, more than 80%, are looking for people who are recently certified with whatever software they use. They don't care as much about college degrees anymore. They are more interested in what can you have been trained on when you get here, if you already use Excel and you already use our other spreadsheets and communication servers like Oracle - whatever they are using. It cuts their training time by a lot, and Google realized this. So, Google put out Google career certifications.
The idea was you would get certified through these and then you'd apply to Google, and Google would hire you. There was an article breaking down the numbers if these were worth it. They said 80% or more people who completed the certification earn more money in the first six months. There's a project management certification. There is a digital marketing certification. There is a certification for coding. So, these are really expert niches. They set the bar for what everyone else hires for and pays. Having Google say these are good enough, everyone else is going to be like, yep, they are, and we want that too.
Joe: I did a lot of armchair internet research for this episode, but I want to hear from Todd because he actually has hired people before. My experience online is all completely academic and exercise, basically. As a hiring manager in the past, what do you think about all this?
Todd: My wife had it interview about a year and a half ago, and the hiring manager said to her, and I love this - he's an engineer…what is the nerdiest thing you've done this month? It's important for one thing because it separates you from the pack, that you're doing things after work because everyone knows the hiring manager is in that role because they did a lot of work when they were off the clock. That's why they're the boss. Now, it's important to remember to put them in their proper place, and they should even if it's a crossover skill, have some relevance to your job to make you a better hire. So, make sure to keep it in the proper place and make sure it's relevant to the industry. And then it's very important if they ask you about it, or they ask you about yourself, you bring it up as a talking point. If you're not comfortable talking about your other activities, show how that will work in the current job that they're applying for.
Joe: If I'm applying for a tech gig, I don't want to bring up that I took Natalie Portman's acting class unless they ask about it.
Todd: Exactly. It is okay to talk about that as a personal thing, but you want to move ahead of the pack with the most skills. The biggest is…be prepared to be asked about it because even if we've done something if we're not prepared to talk about it, it can make you seem like you just patted your resume. I'll give you an example for me. I’ve been a member of Toastmasters for many years. So, when people ask about me, that is the first thing I go to; I say I'm in a communications club called Toastmasters, and what it makes me a polished presenter. So, when there's a presentation at work, I raise my hand. As my boss, if you have a presentation at work, you lean on me for feedback, and I'll help you prepare a presentation. And if you don't feel like doing it, I'm going to do it for you. It's made me good at public speaking, but it's made me an even better listener. I've honed my listening skills every week, so I can communicate better with my team. All thanks to Toastmasters.
joe: Whereas I, if you are my hiring manager and you asked me about a writing MasterClass, I zoned out during while I was cooking dinner, I will be able to tell you who taught it and almost nothing else.