Core77

Google Offering $400, Six-Month Online Certificate in UX Design, "the Equivalent of a Four-Year Degree"

Projected salary: $75,000/year

By Rain Noe - September 3, 2020

in design.edu

In an effort to both boost the economy and train the types of workers they themselves need, Google will shortly be rolling out an ambitious initiative: Google Career Certificates, which one gains by taking their online courses, requiring "about six months to complete."

For a reported tuition of $300-$400, the company is betting they can teach you enough in a half-year's time (rather than you having to attend a traditional university for four years) to land a job. And while you don't have to apply for a job specifically with Google, pursuing it sounds advantageous: "At Google we will consider our new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles," writes Kent Walker, Google's SVP of Global Affairs.

Unsurprisingly there are no ID degrees on offer. The closest we could find to the Core77 wheelhouse was UX Designer.

User experience (UX) designers make technology easier and more enjoyable to use. They create or refine products and interfaces to make them useful, usable, and accessible to users.

This certificate teaches learners the foundations of UX design and research, building low-fidelity designs and wireframes, creating high-fidelity prototypes, and testing.

The median annual wage for UX designers: $75,000

Other fields and salaries mentioned are Data Analyst ($66,000), IT Support Specialist ($54,760), and Project Manager ($93,000). Google also mentions that enrolling in their Certificate program provides "access to career resources: Learners will have access to resources to facilitate their job search and interview preparation."

There's no word yet on when precisely the courses will go online; for now they've got a "Notify me" button on the webpage.

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Tomas Caliente

4 years ago

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For several years now, I've been encountering 23-year old kids with certificates from UX/graphic design/web development bootcamps who are expecting to be awarded senior titles and salaries that everyone else has worked 5–10 years to attain. They say "our instructors told us we would graduate as fully-qualified [insert title here]s." Some of these courses are well-respected but by no means a replacement for a deep commitment to learning a discipline - and then, even if you went to the best school... you're still entry-level! There's also a proliferation of corporate-funded, fee-for-diploma schools, staffed mostly by people who have only been out of school for a few years themselves, contributing to an overall sense that with a little work (and I do mean a little) you should be entitled to whatever your heart desires. Google seems to be tapping into this and (probably) using their enormous capital to corner the market in low-involvement education. Scoop the cream-of-the-crop designers from their classes, if and when they appear, and dump the rest into the market to flood the inboxes of creative directors everywhere.

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Nathan D.

4 years ago

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If that's what Google pays their designers then that explains a lot of things.

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- Daniel Cheng
  
  Nathan D.
  
  4 years ago
  
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  No Nathan, that's the national average. Google UX makes almost double that at just entry level.
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Nathan Gregory

4 years ago

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I've been eagerly awaiting the release of this course for the past month since I first heard about it. I've been taking UX & UI courses on Coursera and Udemy in the meantime hoping to finally make a transition into a career that I actually want to grow in.

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