Business & Entrepreneurship
Courses on starting and running a business: strategy, operations, pricing and the mechanics of getting paid.
Verified courses first, then the rest of the category
The foundations of managing an organisation, covering planning, organising and controlling work. Free from Saylor with a free certificate.
Not independently verified
How people actually behave inside organisations, drawn from research rather than from management folklore. Free from Saylor with a free certificate.
Not independently verified
Writing and speaking in a business context, which is the skill most often assumed and least often taught. Free from Saylor with a free certificate.
Not independently verified
An introduction to turning business data into decisions, covering the analytics stack at a conceptual level. Free from Saylor with a free certificate.
Not independently verified
How the work of producing and delivering something is designed and improved. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
The HR function treated as a management discipline, covering hiring, development and the obligations that come with employing people. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Technology decisions framed as strategy rather than procurement, for people deciding what an organisation should build or buy. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Leadership at the level where strategy is set rather than executed. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Project management as a formal discipline, useful well beyond the people who hold the job title. Free from Saylor with a free certificate.
Not independently verified
Negotiation and conflict handled as learnable methods rather than as temperament. Free from Saylor with a free certificate.
Not independently verified
Graduate-level strategy, covering how a firm decides where to compete and how. Free from Saylor with a free certificate.
Not independently verified
Marketing at the level of positioning and portfolio rather than campaigns. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Managing a firm’s capital and investment decisions, the graduate counterpart to Principles of Finance. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Running a marketing function rather than executing within one. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
The people side of management at graduate level, distinct from the HR function course. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Innovation and sustainability treated together as strategic constraints rather than as separate initiatives. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Project management raised to portfolio and strategy level, above the introductory course. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Operations extended across the supply chain, covering how goods and information move between organisations. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Using data to decide rather than to report, aimed at managers rather than analysts. Free from Saylor with a free certificate.
Not independently verified
Where strategy and ethics meet, taught as one subject rather than as a compliance appendix. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
The advanced counterpart to Saylor’s introductory analytics course, for people building rather than commissioning analysis. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
How data is governed, stored and kept usable inside an organisation, which is usually the constraint on any analytics work. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Presenting analysis so that it changes a decision, which is a distinct skill from producing it. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Operating across borders, covering the differences that make international operations their own subject. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
About this subject
Courses on starting and running a business, from university programmes in strategy and management through to practical material on launching a venture. This is the broadest subject in the directory, which means it holds two quite different kinds of course: academic teaching that assumes you want to understand how organisations work, and operator material that assumes you want to do something on Monday. Both are useful. Knowing which one you are looking at is the first decision.
Guidance
Verification tells you that a course delivers the material it advertises. It cannot tell you whether the approach it teaches will work for your business. These are the things worth checking yourself.
A graduate strategy course and a founder-led course on getting your first ten customers can both be excellent and are not substitutes. University material tends to give you frameworks that survive changes in fashion and will not tell you which tool to use. Operator material tends to be concrete and specific to a moment, a market and a channel. Read the summary for who the course says it is for, and the level, before the syllabus.
Advice that is right for a company with a hundred employees is often wrong for one person with an idea, and the reverse is equally true. Courses on organisational behaviour, operations and change management assume an organisation already exists. Entrepreneurship courses assume it does not. Neither states this as loudly as it should, so it is worth checking what the examples look like.
Business is a subject where a strong personal story is often presented as a method. One person succeeded once is not evidence that a sequence of steps causes success, and survivorship makes this hard to see. Prefer material that says where its ideas come from, admits what it does not know, and describes conditions under which its advice would not apply. Be wary of anything that promises a specific outcome from a specific process.
Company formation, employment obligations, contracts and tax are national. A course on hiring or business law may be accurate and current and still be about a different legal system from yours. Strategy, operations and marketing travel much better than anything with a statute behind it.
This catalogue contains courses of forty hours and courses of forty minutes. A long course is not automatically more useful, but a two-hour treatment of a subject like operations or finance is an orientation rather than a working competence. Where a provider publishes hours we record them, so you can judge before starting rather than after.
Standards
The published standard applies unchanged. These are the checks that tend to matter most in this subject.
A verification says nothing about whether a strategy will work in your market, your industry or your circumstances. We do not assess commercial merit, and no verification is a prediction that a business will succeed.
Questions
No. Verified means the course is real and broadly matches what it advertises. Business outcomes depend on your market, timing, capital and execution, none of which a course can control and none of which we assess.
Neither is better in general. University material is usually stronger on frameworks and evidence, founder material on specifics and current practice. Each listing names the institution or instructor so you can judge which you are getting.
Universities publish openly, and software companies publish training around their own products. Where a course is free to take but charges for a certificate, the listing says so rather than describing it simply as free.
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