6 free marketing courses: keep or skip?
Free courses are mostly lead magnets. Some are genuinely worth the afternoon.
Judged on one criterion: did I use anything from it within a month. Anything that was really a sixty minute advert for a paid tier gets a skip regardless of production quality.
Platform certifications, for the specific platform you use
Narrow, practical and accurate, because the platform has an interest in you using it properly. Worth doing once for whichever tool you live in.
Anything promising a complete marketing education in two hours
The length tells you it is an overview. Overviews feel productive and change nothing, because the gap in your practice is almost never conceptual.
Courses that make you produce something
If you finish with a written plan, a built page or a draft you can use, the format is doing its job. If you finish with notes, it is not.
Certification badges as a career signal
Nobody hiring a marketer has ever been swayed by a badge. A piece of work they can look at is worth fifty of them.
Short, specific, technical courses
One narrow skill, done properly. Analytics setup, a particular ad platform, email deliverability. These transfer directly to the job.
Free courses that require a sales call to access
The course is not the product. You are.
The general rule: free is fine, but check what it is a funnel for before you spend the afternoon. If the answer is obvious within the first ten minutes, that is usually a good sign rather than a bad one.