I Took Three Post-Grad Courses. Only One Actually Helped My Career.
Two years out of college, I was exactly the kind of person this question is for. I was stuck in an entry-level marketing job that paid barely enough to cover rent in my shared apartment, I spent four hours a day resizing graphics for local small business clients, and half my LinkedIn feed was people my age posting their shiny new course certificates, talking about 30% raises and switching to “dream roles.” One night I was eating cold leftover kimchi ramen off a paper plate on my couch, my cat had knocked my water glass over onto my notebook an hour earlier, and I was deep in a Google rabbit hole: what course do I actually need to take to get ahead? I think I deleted three draft lists of “top courses for career growth” that night, because all of them just said the same generic stuff that didn’t apply to me.
First I bit the bullet and signed up for that popular 8-week strategy course everyone was talking about. It was $499, which was almost a full week’s pay after taxes for me back then. I went into it so excited. I bought a new notebook, I started drinking an extra coffee every weeknight to get through the modules. The cat still kept walking across my laptop keyboard halfway through lectures, so I’d have to rewatch 10 minutes almost every time. But the whole time, something felt off. All the case studies were for huge billion-dollar soda and sneaker companies. None of it applied to the work I was actually doing, where the biggest project I had that month was making three Instagram graphics for a local dog groomer. I finished the course, added the certificate to my LinkedIn, even mentioned it in my next 1:1 with my boss to hint at a promotion. She nodded, said that was great, then asked me to re-do the avocado graphic I’d messed up for the grocery store client because I’d picked the wrong shade of green for the third time.
A couple months later, I tried again. This time it was a $15 public speaking course, because I’d had that super awkward moment I still cringe thinking about: I froze up during a team check-in. I was mid-sentence explaining why the social media schedule was a week late, and my brain just went completely blank. I stared at my Zoom screen, all my teammates staring back, for 10 whole seconds before I mumbled “sorry, bad connection” and turned my camera off for five minutes to breathe and recover. So I thought, okay, get better at public speaking, that’s career growth, right? But this course was all about how to give a 20 minute keynote at a conference, how to command a room of 100 people. I never talk to more than 8 people in a meeting. I just don’t want to freeze up when my manager asks me what I did that week. I finished the course, I could tell you how to open a talk with a catchy hook, but I still got nervous in weekly check-ins, and I never once used any of the stuff I learned.
I signed up for the third one totally on a whim. My roommate was taking a 4-week introductory graphic design workshop at the community center down the street, it was $80, it was on Tuesday nights, and I was bored of just scrolling TikTok and eating mint chocolate chip after dinner. So I went with her, no real plan, no expectation it would do anything for my career. We worked on stupid little projects the whole time: I made a birthday card for my cousin, I fixed a blurry photo of my cat I wanted to frame. The teacher was a retired designer who just showed us tiny, practical tricks: how to pick color codes that don’t look garish, how to resize images without making them pixelated, how to ask for feedback on a design without being a jerk. I didn’t even think about it for work until a month after the course ended, when our team’s full-time designer quit suddenly, and we had a two-week backlog of all these tiny graphic jobs no one knew how to do. I raised my hand and said I can do those. I did 12 graphics in two days, didn’t mess up a single color code. My boss was shocked. Six months later, they created a new coordinator role for me that combined marketing and small design work, and it paid $12,000 more a year than my old job.
I’ve thought about this a lot lately, because I see so many people panicking about this same question, dropping thousands on courses that sound impressive but don’t actually touch the problems they deal with every day. I still get that twinge of panic sometimes, when I see someone my age posting about a $10k bootcamp they just finished, and I think, should I be doing that? Am I falling behind? But then I remember: the problem I had wasn’t that I didn’t know how to do big fancy corporate strategy. The problem was I kept messing up simple graphics and wasting everyone’s time, and that tiny, stupid problem was what was keeping me from moving up. Last week I got coffee with a friend who just dropped $2,000 on a project management certificate. She said it looks great on her resume, but she still doesn’t know how to say no to her boss when he dumps three extra last-minute projects on her, which is the actual thing that’s making her want to quit her job.
I don’t have a neat answer, honestly. I still don’t know what the next step is, and I still get confused about what courses to take if I want to keep growing. Right now I’m thinking of taking a basic personal finance workshop at that same community center, not because it’ll get me a promotion, but because I spend way too much time at work stressing about how much I have in my savings, and that stress makes me mess up simple stuff anyway. Is that career growth? I don’t know. I used to look for courses that would look good to other people. Now I think I’ll just look for the ones that fix the thing that’s making me want to throw my laptop across the room this week. That’s good enough for me, for now.
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