Are online courses regarded as the equivalent of professional experience?

Question

My background is in Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Last year I paid and attended android developer nano-degree by google course.

At the end of it I uploaded my capstone project on play store.

Now I am watching another course on Udemy called NodeJS - The Complete Guide (incl. MVC, REST APIs, GraphQL) which teaches you how to create node.js. applications. I have also attended two other Udemy courses regarding Android Development.

I applied for various android role positions, but didn't hear anything back. I was expected at least to be interviewed on my capstone's project code which is also in github. The code has been reviewed and works cool. Of course, I need to use at some point patterns like RxJava and MVVM.

But is all this considered as commercial experience or I wasted my money watching online courses?

Answer 1

There is a bit of a false dichotomy in your final question.

First of all, training courses are not considered professional (or commercial) experience, because it does not meet the definition of professional experience. There may be courses where you may have a placement within a professional environment, working on professional project, and that may be muddying the water a little, but they are very rare.

Professional experience means to be employed in the profession in question. There are a range of implications that step from that. Commercial experience implies that you've worked on a product that has seen some degree of commercialisation (in other words, you sold it to someone.) Note that sticking an app on an App Store is likely to count for very little given how trivial that is to do. Get a large number of downloads, and it may be a different story.

But is all this considered as commercial experience or I wasted my money watching online courses?

If you end goal was to gain commercial experience, then you have (probably) not reached that goal by doing a Udacity course, but that doesn't necessarily mean you wasted your money.

If you learnt valuable skills as part of that course, it makes you more employable. If the course is recognised by the person making the hiring decision, you're even more employable.

Just because some large organisation "accredits" a course doesn't mean that it is held in universal regard.

Also, I just want to point out, that even widely-known certification authorities are considered as useless by some people, for various reasons. Just as degrees are considered the same by some people too.

Answer 2

It's good to have a certain course completed from a widely-known certification authority (online of offline) and have the certificate, but most of the time, that counts towards your proficiency level and theoretical knowledge.

Majority of the cases, they are not considered as professional experience.

If you have pet-projects which you can showcase, that adds to the value, sure.

• If you're searching for entry-level positions (fresh out of college), they may look very good on your CV.
• However, if you're having certain experience, and the course is not directly related to your field/ domain of work experience, the online certifications are seldom worthy of substantial influence alone.

Answer 3

No. Not at all. They are two different things. Online courses are good for you if they teach something useful but they are not professional experience. In any case, they would be comparable to formal education, but it's still not quite like that.

In my experience, the best use of online courses is keeping your work rather than getting one, but in any case, if your question is "But is all this considered as commercial experience or I wasted my money watching online courses?" then you answered the question yourself, as I think it's accurate to infer that you didn't learn any skill (in that case, why should companies take it into account?).