Many businesses and schools are open again this week and one of the first websites employees and students are likely to visit is Google where they will find a suggestion to partake in free online courses.

This message, which you can see in the header image above, appears just under the main search bar. This area is usually used for messages for users to commemorate some important event or milestone.

The link leads here to the Google Digital Skills for Africa Courses List page.

“Discover a range of free learning content designed to help grow your business or jumpstart your career. You can learn by selecting individual modules, or dive right in and take an entire course end-to-end,” the page description reads.

The list claims that there are 156 courses to take across the categories of digital marketing, data and career development.

Looking at the filter list and we can see that these courses range in length from under two hours to over 20 hours. Each course has a difficulty rating (beginner, intermediate and advanced) and there are several providers.

Google is, of course, one of these providers but there are other familiar names such as Monash University, The Open University, Udacity and more.

The course that is headlining this offering is “fundamentals of digital marketing”. This course is made for beginners, takes 40 hours to complete and has videos for those who don’t want to read through too much text. The course is IAB-accredited and, at the end, those who finish it will be granted a certificate by Google which the company claims will improve your CV, help you land a job and grow your career.

“Master the basics of digital marketing with our free Interactive Advertising Bureau-accredited course. There are 26 modules to explore, all created by Google trainers, packed full of practical exercises and real-world examples to help you turn knowledge into action,” reads the course page.

The fundamentals of digital marketing main page can be found here.

If all of this sounds familiar it’s because, back in 2019, Google did the same thing. We’ll never turn down some free information so it’s nice to see that the company has stuck with this idea and is encouraging users to give it a try at the start of this year again.