I Spent $1200 On Post-Grad Courses And Here’s What Actually Moved My Career Forward
Three months after I graduated college, I camped out on my best friend’s couch in Brooklyn, splitting a cold container of lo mein that had been sitting in her fridge for two days, scrolling LinkedIn until my thumb hurt. Everyone I’d gone to school with was posting something: “Just completed my Google Project Management Certificate!” “Excited to share I’ve graduated from a UX design bootcamp!” I had a dead-end marketing assistant job at a local real estate firm, paid $1200 a month for a room in a shared apartment, and couldn’t remember the last time I’d done something that felt like it was moving my career forward. So I did what any panicked 22-year-old does: I started buying courses.
First it was the $800 UX bootcamp prep course, advertised all over my Instagram by a girl my age who said she quit her barista job and made $90k a year after six months. Then I added a $400 content writing masterclass from a guy who posted 15-second reels about “hacking your way to a six-figure salary” before 25. I was so proud of myself for buying them, like I’d already checked the “get promoted” box. I printed out a syllabus and stuck it on my wall. Two weeks later, I’d fallen asleep to three lectures in a row, my old laptop getting so hot on my twin bed it left a faint, permanent mark on the sheet. I never finished the UX course. I did finish the writing one, but half the advice was about building a personal brand on short-form video, which I had zero interest in doing. I just wanted a job that didn’t require me to refill my boss’s vanilla latte every morning at 9:15 sharp. That $1200 sat there, a waste of three weeks of my after-work time, and I’d close the browser tab every time I saw it, feeling guilty for falling for another hype. When my mom called to ask how the courses were going, I lied and said I was halfway through, making great progress. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d wasted more money than I made in two weeks of work on something I couldn’t even be bothered to finish.
A couple months after that, my company announced a free two-day in-house workshop on the new CRM system we were switching to. It was on a Friday and Saturday, and everyone complained about giving up their weekend. My boss signed me up anyway, said someone had to learn it so I could teach the rest of the team. I went, grumpy the whole time, drinking bad office coffee that left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, but I paid attention anyway—what else was I gonna do, scroll my phone the whole time? I asked the guy leading it a million questions about edge cases no one else cared about, wrote down messy notes about how to build automated workflows in the margin of a branded notebook I got for free. Back at work, I started fixing all the messy contact lists people had, building those workflows that cut 10 hours a week of busywork for the whole sales team. No one asked me to do it, it just seemed easier than doing all the manual data entry myself.
Three months later, a senior marketing manager from our regional headquarters slid into my work Slack. She’d heard about the workflows I built, said she was putting together a new growth team and needed someone who actually knew how to make that CRM work. The role paid $20k more a year than my old job, and I didn’t even have to apply through the official, soul-sucking HR portal. That’s when I started thinking about all that hype around post-grad courses, and how no one tells you the boring, unglamorous truth.
Last month I went to a happy hour for people from my college graduating class, and half the people there had a stack of certifications on their resume they’d never used, spent thousands on courses they half-finished. The girl who got the biggest promotion last year, she got it after taking a free 8-week advanced Excel class her company offered through their professional development fund. No one else wanted to take it, because it sounded boring, so she learned all this stuff no one else on her team knew, and now she manages three people.
I don’t mean all paid courses are useless. If you’re switching careers entirely, like I half-heartedly wanted to do back when I bought the UX course, a structured course can give you a baseline you can’t get just from googling. But what I see so much of, especially with people my age, is that we’re so desperate to check that “doing something for my career” box that we buy these big, fancy courses that don’t actually connect to anything we’re already doing. It feels productive to pay the money and have the course, right? It’s a lot easier than volunteering for a boring project at work or asking your manager for extra work that’s outside your original job description.
I still get that twinge, sometimes. Last week I saw a reel for a new social media strategy course that was $500, and I almost clicked buy before I even read what it was about. I still have that little voice in my head that says I’m not doing enough, that I’m falling behind everyone else who keeps posting their new certificates. But then I remembered, the thing that’s gotten me the most recognition at my new job this year is that I volunteered to lead a small email testing project, and I’ve just been googling every question I have as I go, asking the more senior person on my team for help when I get stuck. That’s free, it’s messy, it doesn’t come with a certificate I can post on LinkedIn, but it’s actually teaching me stuff that matters.
I still have that $1200 worth of uncompleted courses in my email inbox. Sometimes I think about asking for a refund, but I never do. I guess they were worth it, if only to teach me that the best stuff for your career isn’t the stuff you buy when you’re panicking. It’s the boring, unglamorous stuff that’s right in front of you, that no one else wants to do. That’s it. No big secret, no fancy credential. Just showing up for the boring stuff. (Word count: 1182)
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