Get a Free Education: Professional Development Potential
While my boss in on vacation, I get to read her daily copy of the Wall Street Journal. Today, I found an interesting article, Yale on $0 a Day (login required), and started thinking this might be the ticket to furthering my education.
The article talks about colleges like Yale and MIT that are putting their course syllabi, lectures, and and sample tests online. For someone with enough self motivation, it could be the perfect solution to getting the skills and knowledge needed for career advancement.
Obviously, you won’t be getting an actual degree from you ad-hoc home-study course, but you can apply the information to your career and use it to make a difference at work. For example, I’ve found the following courses and MIT’s OpenCourseWare site and will see if they could make a postive contribution to my career.
- Communicating with Data: Communicating With Data has a distinctive structure and content, combining fundamental quantitative techniques of using data to make informed management decisions with illustrations of how real decision makers, even highly trained professionals, fall prey to errors and biases in their understanding. We present the fundamental concepts underlying the quantitative techniques as a way of thinking, not just a way of calculating, in order to enhance decision-making skills. Rather than survey all of the techniques of management science, we stress those fundamental concepts and tools that we believe are most important for the practical analysis of management decisions, presenting the material as much as possible in the context of realistic business situations from a variety of settings. Exercises and examples drawn from marketing, finance, operations management, strategy, and other management functions.
- Applied Statistics: This course is an introduction to applied statistics and data analysis. Topics include collecting and exploring data, basic inference, simple and multiple linear regression, analysis of variance, nonparametric methods, and statistical computing. It is not a course in mathematical statistics, but provides a balance between statistical theory and application. Prerequisites are calculus, probability, and linear algebra.
- Communications for Managers: Writing and speaking skills necessary for a career in management. Students polish communication strategies and methods through discussion of principles, examples, and cases. Several written and oral assignments, most based on material from other subjects and from career development activities. Restricted to first-year Sloan School of Management graduate students.