Udacity and Google team up to offer free job hunting courses for all

Udacity has long been a place to learn new skills to improve your general career prospects on everything from programming to driverless cars. But what if your problem isn’t the knowledge, but the step of proving to potential employers that you’re the one they want? If your CV rambles on for pages, and you clam up during interviews then you simply won’t get hired, no matter how good you are.

Now in collaboration with Google, Udacity is trying to fix that problem with a range of new free courses designed to get promising candidates into interviews and ultimately on to the company floor. The courses cover everything from CV writing to interview preparation and take between a day and four weeks to complete. If you wanted to do all of them (which is unlikely, given some assist with contrary career paths), you’d be done in just under 15 weeks.

Google has pledged to help one million Europeans find a job or grow their business by 2020 and sees Udacity as a useful partner in that strategy. The collaboration comes off the back of a smaller trial back in March, where 60,000 Grow with Google scholars were invited to take part in the Networking for Career Success course. Now that module – which covers real-life networking as well as the virtual space of LinkedIn – is included as one of the 12 launched today.

“This next generation of talent will enter the job market possessing a diverse range of skills, but facing a lot of competition, and a rapidly-shifting hiring landscape,” wrote Udacity’s vice president of careers, Kathleen Mullaney – herself a former Googler from the Maps division.

“They’re going to need every resource they can get to make sure they’re able to compete successfully for available roles. They are not alone in benefiting from this kind of support. Mid-career professionals pursuing career change, older workers returning to the workforce, and anyone looking ahead to a job search, will find these courses valuable as well.”

You can browse the available courses here, but here are the direct links to each course:

• Refresh your CV
• Craft your covering letter
• Optimise your GitHub
• Strengthen your LinkedIn network and brand (this also covers traditional offline networking)
• Data Structures and Algorithms in Python and Swift for technical interviews
• Interview preparation for Data Science, Front-end, Android, VR, Full Stack, and iOS