We are currently in a state of lockdown. So are other states, countries, etc. With the coronavirus influenced pandemic, schools and colleges seem to have shut their doors. As an MBA aspirant or student, you must be intimately familiar with the repercussions of this lockdown. Your b-school GD-WAT-PIs, summer internships and jobs are all indefinitely delayed in many cases. While the situation looks bleak, there’s also a silver lining. You have the ability to utilise this time to learn a new skill or fine-tune your old ones. So how do you do that? One option is taking an online course. To help you along, today we list down a few online finance courses that you can pursue to use your time more productively. From personal finance to financial modeling, find a little something for your expertise level here. So read on!
Whether you’re a fresher, waiting to start your first job post b-school, or an aspirant waiting to convert a call from a b-school, adding a finance related skill to your CV is like adding a feather to your cap. It stands to help you benefit in various ways. Even if you end up in a non finance related job, these skills can and will come in handy. I mean, everyone needs to know about investing, personal finance, etc, right? So here’s a list of finance courses you can take up online while you have some time.
Finance Courses We Found Promising:
Fundamentals of Finance
In this 4.5 hours course hosted and created by Miti Vaidya, XLRI Alum and Ex TAS, along with the Konversations Team, get ready for finance lectures at b-school! This course is ideal for those who want to shine in the first job of their career in Finance. Whether you plan to start applying for finance roles, already have some finance job interviews lined up or have recently started your first job in Finance, this course will help you perform better than your peers. It covers ALL the basic & essential topics anyone would need, to start in the real world of Finance careers and totally worth it for 3999 INR.
Finance Foundations
In this course by LinkedIn Learning, Brigham Young University business professors Jim and Kay Stice provide a comprehensive overview of finance, touching on everything from reading a balance sheet to understanding derivatives and securities. They tackle questions such as "What is the difference between short-term financial management and long-term financing?" and "What is the difference between a traditional bank, an investment bank, and an investment fund?" Along the way, you can get an inside look at financial reports from companies such as Walmart and Toys "R" Us, the IPOs of Microsoft and Facebook, and even the data that go into personal financial decisions, such as deciding whether to buy a car.
For 1400 INR, we think it’s a good deal!
Finance for the Real World - Corporate Finance 101
If you want to learn more about the basics of finance, improve your financial literacy or want to understand finance terms like Time Value of Money, Default Risk Premium, Net Present Value, Efficient Market Hypothesis and Modern Portfolio Theory, this course by Udemy will help you.
Note: Presently, Udemy is running a sale so it’s a great time to buy any courses at Udemy.
Finance for Non-Financial Professionals
A free course by Coursera, upon completion of this course, you will have gained general financial knowledge and an in-depth understanding of the impact of your decisions outside your functional area. Conducted by Prof. David Standen, Instructor at the University of California, Irvine Extension, the content of the course includes selected aspects of finance from a non-financial specialist perspective. Specific topics include: Financial Analysis; Planning, Forecasting, and Budgeting; Cash Flow, and Strategic Financing. This course is scheduled to start 27th March, Pacific Time. So if you’re a non-finance student wanting to decode those financial mysteries before b-school begins, sign up today!
Behavioral Investing
Being offered FREE on Coursera and conducted by Prof. Vaidya Nathan, Faculty Director, PGP-Finance at ISB and ISB Alumni Endowment Research Fellow, this course will help you learn how individuals and firms make financial decisions, and how those decisions might deviate from those predicted by traditional financial or economic theory.
In this course, you will explore the nature of these biases and their origins, using insights from psychology, neurosciences and experimental economics on how the human mind works. From these biases, you will be able to examine how the insights of behavioural finance complement the traditional finance paradigm. You will also look at the micro and macro biases. Finally, You will explore how these insights describe more complicated topics such as fat tail events and financial crises.
Corporate Finance Essentials
Conducted by Javier Estrada, Professor of Financial Management at IESE Business School, University of Navarra, this course will enable you to understand key financial issues related to companies, investors, and the interaction between them in the capital markets. By the end of this course, you should be able to understand most of what you read in the financial press and use the essential financial vocabulary of companies and finance professionals.
This course is also available for FREE on Coursera.
Financial Markets and Investment Strategy Specialization
Conducted on Coursera by various professors from ISB, this specialisation contains a bundle of courses for the finance student. The Investment Management Specialization teaches professional asset management of securities using portfolio management and behavioural aspects of finance. Specific topics include: An Introduction To The Basics Of Finance, How To Evaluate Risk and Expected Return, The Behavioural Aspect Of Investment Strategy, and current trends.
Behavioural Finance
Conducted on Coursera by Emma Rasiel, Associate Chair and Professor of Economics at Duke University, This course is intended to guide participants towards better financial choices. Learn how to improve your spending, saving, and investing decisions for the future.
Financial Markets
Conducted on Coursera by Robert Shiller, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, the ultimate goal of this course is using such industries effectively and towards a better society. The course provides you with an overview of the ideas, methods, and institutions that permit human society to manage risks and foster enterprise. With an emphasis on financially-savvy leadership skills, it contains a description of practices today and analysis of prospects for the future. It also introduces you to risk management and behavioural finance principles in order to understand the real-world functioning of securities, insurance, and banking industries.
Investment Analysis & Portfolio Management - Core Finance
At discount currently, this course on Udemy teaches you Financial Analysis done right. You'll master sophisticated investment analysis and portfolio management techniques that are rigorously grounded in academic and practitioner literature. You’ll also explore and master powerful relationships between stock prices, returns, and risk, quantify and measure your investment risk, from scratch, discover what your financial advisor should be doing to manage your portfolio - to manage your investments and a lot more.
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These are just some courses that we found relevant for MBA aspirants and students. But you can, of course, trawl the internet and find a course more relevant to your interests. While doing that, here are a few tips that can help you select an online course:
How To Pick an Online Course
Clearly stated admission and curriculum:
Make sure that the course you are subscribing to online has a set admission criteria and curriculum. Having said this, make sure that you pursue an online course with a clear goal in mind. To learn a specific skill or understand a concept are great goals when taking up an online course!
Make sure you understand who the course is for. There should also be a list of requirements necessary for understanding the syllabus. In the case of beginner-level courses, this usually doesn’t go beyond high school-level math and Excel. In the case of intermediate or expert courses, you might need to have some formal or informal experience in finance-related topics.
However, there are advanced courses that are geared toward anyone and still impart useful knowledge. It’s generally better to stay away from courses where the target audience isn’t stated upfront.
An experienced lecturer:
There’s one more thing you should check before you decide to enroll. Who prepared the course material? Many people get into finance via online courses, and some of the big names in the finance world are involved in teaching these skills.
For example, you can find courses helmed by award-winning university professors. Make sure that the lecturer is experienced in the field that you’re interested in. You can look for courses taught by finance writers, journalists or coaches. It’s usually a good idea to avoid lecturers with no published works whatsoever.
Many people also tend to look at the cost of the course as a parameter for the quality of the course. While the price of a course is important, there are many free courses (we’ve listed some here) that one can pursue to learn a skill. Inversely, some expensive online courses can also help you greatly.
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Final Thoughts
Some people start taking courses without any clear goals in mind. This approach can yield good results as long as you choose a class with a comprehensive and well-structured syllabus. Online finance courses are especially useful to people who know exactly what they want. You can use any of these classes as a springboard and become proficient in a finance-related field of your choice. For example, you can follow them up with investment courses or go in any other direction you want.
We hope this list helps you in your free time, to learn a new skill or brush up on an old one!
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