Best of Online Learning: Business

By: Sohini Surapaneni

Even if your teen isn’t looking into business as a potential major, business skills are incredibly useful in nearly every field and every job. In light of recent social distancing measures, this summer is an excellent time to use the internet and learn the basic skills and fundamental concepts of business.

Gaining business skills is an excellent head start for future business majors and for students looking for internships, where listing concrete skills could make a difference on their resume. Business skills are even useful for students with leadership positions in school clubs or organizations. Your teen may use marketing skills when fundraising for Habitat for Humanity, or make accounting spreadsheets as a treasurer for student government. Motivated students may even decide to start their own business or non-profit, and an understanding of entrepreneurship, finance, marketing and management will improve their probability of success.

Pre-college summer programs in business specifically for high school students are available at top undergraduate business schools such as NYU Stern, UPenn Wharton, and UMichign Ross. These are usually in-person and on campus, but due to Covid-19, programs are either cancelled or conducted remotely for Summer 2020. While acceptance to these pre-college programs does not guarantee admission to the university later on, it is a valuable way to spend a summer. That being said, the greatest barrier to doing these pre-college programs is cost, which can amount to thousands of dollars. The application deadlines for most of these programs have passed, but they may be worth considering for future summers.

The good news is that there are plenty of free or inexpensive classes online for students interested in taking classes in practically every field within business. For the sake of simplicity, this blog will cover the recommended courses and benefits of taking online courses in the following four categories:

- Finance
- Marketing
- Management
- Entrepreneurship

The courses we recommend are simply suggestions. Your teen can search for specific courses through online learning platforms such as EdX and Coursera, who partner with companies and universities to offer free and paid-for courses in various subjects. Most courses on these websites are free to take, but require payment or a subscription to get an official certificate of completion that can be listed on a resume. If payment is an issue, EdX and Coursera also offer need-based financial aid. Class Central is a database that you can use to search and sift through free online classes. Youtube videos are another resource for free online lectures. If your student is not sure if they would like to take business classes in the future, a great way to start is with a basic economics course. If their high school does not offer economics, they can try University of Illinois’s Microeconomics Principles course or University of California Irvine’s Principle of Macroeconomics. If your student would like to delve into specific business categories, that’s when they might want to start taking courses or teaching themselves about finance, marketing, management, and entrepreneurship.

 

Finance

Finance is all things related to managing company funds including accounting. A great place to start is through MIT’s class on EdX called Financial Accounting. Financial Accounting is a required introductory course for most business majors that covers basic accounting - reading balance sheets, managing debt and ethics. Most high school students take a course in Consumer Education in order to graduate. Financial Accounting is a continuation of this course --- just far more detailed, related to finance and specific to accounting. Financial Accounting is an excellent starting point for the students that would like an initial exposure to finance, even if they do not want to pursue it as a major.

If your teen would like to continue learning about finance, the next step would be to take an introductory foundational course. Great choices would be Columbia University’s Introduction to Corporate Finance or MIT’s Foundations of Modern Finance I and II, which will cover theories and topics regarding investments, bonds and risk.

If your teen is interested in investing and wants to get involved in an Investment Club at school, there are many great books, articles and youtube videos on this subject. This Bill Ackman video is a great place to start. Udemy’s Stock Market from Scratch gives a great overview and Morningsta’s Investing Basics class provides one of the best free in-depth lessons. Khan Academy also has a good unit on personal finance that covers investment, retirement and stocks.

 

Marketing

To get introduced to marketing itself, UPenn Wharton has a course called Introduction to Marketing that will teach students the three key concepts of marketing: “branding, customer centricity, and practical, go-to-market strategies.” For students that would like a foundation of digital marketing in order to find virtual internships for the summer, this Seven-Course Specialization in Digital Marketing from the University of Illinois goes in depth. Some digital marketing internships require the ability to code in languages such as HTML. Your teen can take a look at Best of Online Learning: Coding for resources on how to get started.

For young people interested in marketing, a significant premium is placed on online marketing skills, including website development, social media, videos and blogs. Social media marketing is actually one of the fastest growing business opportunities, where even students can find work opportunities. Virtual Internship Opportunities for High School Students addresses some of the steps involved in securing an internship this summer.

Because marketing is incredibly data driven, it is also important to gain an understanding of statistics. If not an option at their high school, students can even take an introductory statistics course through University of Amsterdam’s Basic Statistics, or IIMB’s Statistics for Business I and II. Statistics is also applicable in other fields, including finance, making it an essential math course for any student looking to get into business.

 

Management  

Management is the planning and organization of internal operations within a company. Compared to the other categories in business, management relies on soft skills such as communication, emotional and social intelligence, and people skills. No matter what industry students are interested in, an understanding of these soft skills is incredibly useful to land a job or internship.

University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign has a course called Operations Management: Analysis and Improvement Methods, which focuses on the technique and analytical aspects of sales, operations and management. On the other hand, the University of California - Irvine has a course called Project Management: The Basics for Success, which focuses more on the communication, planning, and leadership skills behind management.

IESE, a reputable European business school, has a Five-Course Specialization on management, which covers accounting, finance, marketing, and organizational behavior. Part of the course puts the student in real-life situations where they need to apply what they learn in a management setting. A big part of management is not what is learnt in the books, but how much a student can apply it in real life.

UPenn Wharton also has a course called Global Business Strategy. Beyond decision-making and economics, this course covers social impact and the ethics of business. It teaches students how to “apply effective business strategies to real-world problems through a deep understanding of the global practices and trends shaping the world today.” This course could serve as inspiration to your teen if they have any goals of entrepreneurship, leadership, global business or social-impact.

University of California Irvine has a course called Communication in the Workplace, which covers topics such as communications styles, obstacles to communication, and proven techniques for effective conference calls and webinars. Not only is this effective for students that would like to learn management skills, but it is also essential as your teen goes on to land internships and job offers. Effective communication, both in-person and online, verbal and nonverbal, reveals a level of professionalism and real-world skills that are useful during interviews and in various careers.

Other useful courses include UPenn’s Improving Communication Skills, which covers concepts such as trust, deception and cooperation. University of Illinois - Urbana has a course called Foundations of Everyday Leadership and a follow-up course called Applications of Everyday Leadership, which start off their Strategic Leadership and Management course series.    

 

Entrepreneurship  

An entrepreneur is someone who designs, launches and runs a new business. Entrepreneurship is unlike other business fields in that it requires  creativity, initiative, and ability to manage a fledgling business to a variable state and beyond. Below are some courses from reputable universities that take students through the process of creating a start-up. Even if your teen would like to start a non-profit, nearly all of these skills overlap and are worth checking out.

The University of Pennsylvania - Wharton has a Series of Entrepreneurship Courses, which collectively take about 43 hours. Each course tackles one of the four major stages in creating a start-up -- beginning with developing the opportunity, and ending with an Entrepreneurship Capstone Project, in which students create a pitch deck for the idea. According to UPenn, “the top-scoring projects will be introduced to the most appropriate venture capital firms in Wharton Entrepreneurship’s network, according to region and sector.” These venture capital firms will essentially invest real money into the best pitch decks to help make these start-up ideas a successful reality.

The University of Maryland has a similar Series of Entrepreneurship Courses, which is made of four sections. It starts with the development of ideas, and ends with a capstone project. Unlike UPenn’s entrepreneurship course series, the University of Maryland does not score capstone projects or introduce students to potential investors. That being said, this is still a highly rated entrepreneurship series that takes about 35 hours to complete.

This last option is from University of Leeds, which is located in England. This is the shortest of the three programs, taking about 24 hours in total to complete. It has six courses, the first of which is called Starting a Business 1: Vision and Opportunity. In addition to essential topics such as generating ideas, funding, and progress, this series also uniquely covers networking and teamwork, which are incredibly valuable even outside of entrepreneurship.

 

For additional information and insights, check out our other blogs:

Best of Online Learning - University Classes

Best of Online Learning - Music and Art 

Best of Online Learning - Coding

Best of Online Learning - Languages

 

About Sohini Surapaneni:

Sohini is currently a student at New York University focusing on Economics major and a double minor in philosophy and business studies. She is passionate about helping Versed’s mission to make educational resources accessible to everyone, and regularly contributes to the blog. Her articles are researched and supplemented by her and her peers experience going through the college application process (and of course with her immigrant parents by her side!).

 

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