These Online Certificates Complement Any Arts Degree
Gain marketable skills and expand your horizons without breaking the bank!
If you’re looking to make the most of your time and bulk up your resume during your free time, take advantage of the countless free and affordable online certifications that you can get from home right now!
We compiled a list of certifications and resources that are perfect for anyone with an Arts degree, but based on your interests and willingness to branch out there are endless options for you to gain some amazing new skills that will help you expand your horizons!
Note that costs for these certifications vary from completely free to over $1000, but we generally tried to find some of the most affordable and reputable options for each category.
Indigenous Perspectives and Histories
Indigenous Canada, an online MOOC course offered by the University of Alberta, has some delivery options that provide a shareable completion certificate upon completion. This course is accessible to the general public as well as currently enrolled U of A students, and can be completed asynchronously according to your schedule! Learning more about Indigenous histories and relationships when it comes to the land that we occupy Treaty 6 Territory beneficiaries is an important step toward decolonizing our everyday lives and institutions.
From an Indigenous perspective, this course explores key issues facing Indigenous peoples today from a historical and critical perspective highlighting national and local Indigenous-settler relations.
For an extensive (but non-exhaustive) list of additional resources that you can use to better understand topics surrounding Indigenous peoples, definitely visit the Myseum Toronto website. They’ve compiled “reports, courses, documentaries, books, podcasts, organizations, and articles” that can help guide your learning.
Digital Marketing and Communications
Arts students write a lot, and I’d bet that you’ve had at least one semester where you felt like you were churning out a full-length, researched, and triple-edited essay every single week. If you’re able to gather essential information, desired outcomes/goals for a campaign, and an understanding of your intended audience, you can apply some of the fundamental skills gained during an Arts degree to digital marketing and communications.
A great place to start for commonly applicable social media business skills is Meta Blueprint Certifications, which give you the skills needed to use Facebook and Instagram advertising/business tools. With courses that range from 100-level essentials to 700-level expert insights, you’ve got a lot of room to grow based on your interests. These two platforms might be familiar to you as a user, but there are a lot of interesting tools and tricks that you can leverage behind the scenes to make your content thrive. Note though that these certifications do cost money, primarily since the certification exams are remotely proctored, and the higher up in level you go the more they cost.
Another is Twitter Flight School, which provides simple certification courses for using Twitter as a professional. Learn how to make good Twitter posts, compelling videos, paid promotions, and more depending on the topics that sound interesting to you! Although this is more niche than some other options, if you’re working for any kind of political or advocacy-based organization Twitter can be an incredible tool for getting your message out and gathering support for your cause.
If you want to go the extra mile and get credentials related to social media scheduling and analytics, Hootsuite offers free basic training through their certification course programs, although their certifications begin at $99. Scheduling/analytics tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer are extremely common with larger organizations, and having some kind of training with them can set you up as the best candidate for their positions related to communications.
Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)
The Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) course, offered for free by the Government of Canada, doesn’t take a great deal of time to complete, provides some essential information about equity measures in public-sector environments, and teaches participants important skills for addressing barriers to gender equity in everyday life. In the end, participants will receive a certificate to demonstrate the perspectives and skills they have gained.
This course is designed as a basic introduction to GBA+. You will learn to identify how GBA+ can enhance the responsiveness, effectiveness and outcomes of federal government initiatives while applying some foundational GBA+ concepts and processes.
Here’s an expensive one for the ambitious! If you’re looking to make a career out of implementing EDI measures, you should seriously consider becoming a Canadian Certified Inclusion Professional. Although the default registration fee is $1,199, getting CCIP Certified is probably the most widely recognized and respected certification for this line of work, and can be a massive asset throughout your entire career. Passing an exam is necessary to get certified.
The certification will enable diversity and inclusion professionals practicing in Canada to obtain a formal and standardized recognition of their knowledge, skills and experience in the diversity and inclusion field.
The certification is a rigorous process through which the knowledge and experience of diversity and inclusion professionals are assessed against the standard constituted by the CCIP™ Competency Framework.
Besides certifications, there are always some EDI speaker sessions, workshops, events, and more happening right here at the U of A. Some additional resources can be found here.
Art and Design
Many online courses made for artists and aspiring creators exist and include certificates to prove that you put some effort into expanding your skillset. Whether you’re looking to get into graphic design, photography, video production, painting, or any other kind of creative endeavor, taking some basics courses and earning a few certifications can turn your passion into a true asset for any team
An example of this is “Fundamental Illustrations in Adobe Illustrator” offered through Alison, a course that sets you up with the foundational knowledge needed to get started using Adobe Illustrator. You don’t need to be an expert in Adobe tools to be able to use them, and by learning about their core functions and how to navigate their interfaces you can be confident when you might have to use them while working or volunteering. After completing the course, you’ll have the option to purchase an affordable digital or more expensive physical certificate.
You might think this is kind of a cop-out… but paid learning platforms like Skillshare are really excellent for getting new skills and ideas when it comes to art and design. Although they don’t normally offer certificates for completing their courses, you’ll formulate some challenging and unique art and design projects that can be added to your ever-growing portfolio, never rushing your progress and letting you show off what you’ve learned in a unique format.
First Aid, CPR, and Other Health Responses
Learning how to recognize and respond to common injuries and health complications is something that makes you more generally competent as a person! Developing some health response skills such as CPR, First Aid, and more give you the skills to help the people around you regardless of if you’re working an office job, managing employees, working with children or the elderly, or operating in remote locations with others.
One consistent online provider for First Aid and CPR training is St. John’s Ambulance, which only charges $25 to get certified in First Aid/CPR Awareness from the comfort of your home. All you need is a device and stable internet to get started! They also offer different types of workplace safety certifications like WHMIS, Cannabis, and Dangerous Goods Transportation if those happen to interest you.
The Canadian Red Cross occasionally offers online First Aid certification courses, and these sessions set you up with some foundational skills that you can easily expand on in the future if that’s something you’re interested in. Note that they offer consistent in-person training across the country all year long, and this is a much more reliable option than waiting for online sessions to open up.
Google Workspaces
Google tools are becoming more and more common in the workplace, rivaling other team organization software like Microsoft Office/Teams in popularity and accessibility. Learning how to best harness some of the powerful
Google Garage’s “Fundamentals of Digital Marketing” course can be a good place to expand into general digital marketing skills if nothing in the section about this above fits your interests. Google, of course, has one of the most advanced marketing platforms in the entire world, and learning how to take advantage of it can be a huge advantage if you’d like to branch out.
Google Analytics Academy can help set you up with the knowledge to properly interpret and analyze website data to better grow any kind of business or organization’s online presence. This is a really neat skill set to have, gives you some basic coding knowledge when it comes to web services, and has a ton of content to explore if you find yourself enjoying the courses.
Everything else. Google offers courses about ads, business pages, Waze, and more if you’re interested in checking it out. Getting a few certifications from this catalog is a good way to better understand how Google tools can be used both personally and professionally.
This article was written by Logan Bourdon, who serves as the Student Engagement and Outreach Specialist for the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Student Services. Logan graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta in 2020 and has spent the past 4 years working in student services, community engagement, and communications.
