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 launch half of Illinois’ entrepreneurship pair, on getting a venture out of the door. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
US federal taxation for individuals and sole traders, taught at university level and directly relevant to anyone self-employed there. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Wharton’s quantitative modelling specialization, aimed at analysts who build the models rather than read them. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
McMaster’s finance specialization for a general audience, deliberately pitched at people with no finance background. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
IESE’s finance course for managers who have to read and act on numbers without being accountants. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Emory’s version of finance for managers without a finance background, covering statements, budgets and the vocabulary. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Finance explained to people whose job is something else, from UC Irvine. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Darden’s foundational accounting course, aimed at reading financial statements rather than preparing them. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
The advanced continuation of Illinois’ financial accounting sequence. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
The foundational accounting course in Illinois’ sequence, before its advanced topics course. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Illinois’ financial management specialization, drawn from its online MBA teaching. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Robert Shiller’s Yale course on financial markets, running seven modules across risk management, behavioural finance, stocks and bonds, the mortgage crisis, options, and investment banking. One of the most widely taken finance courses published anywhere, and taught by a Nobel laureate in economics.
Not independently verified
Reading and interpreting company accounts, which is the skill that turns published financial statements into something you can act on. Free from The Open University, startable without signing up, with a free statement of participation on completion.
Not independently verified
How individual firms behave within markets, sitting between introductory microeconomics and strategy. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Michigan’s finance specialization framed around decisions rather than around instruments. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
IESE’s foundational management sequence, taught from a European business school perspective. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
The opening course of Google’s project management certificate, useful alone as an orientation to what the discipline involves before committing to the full programme.
Not independently verified
A self-paced written course covering personal development, digital entrepreneurship, sales, and online business fundamentals. The provider offers a 62-page PDF with 50 chapters, a structured 90-day action plan, practical templates, and exercises designed to help learners turn their knowledge into digital products and business opportunities.
Not independently verified
IBM on generative AI within HR work, one of the few structured treatments of AI in that function. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
IBM on applying generative AI to project delivery rather than to product design. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
IBM on generative AI for sales work, addressing the selling process rather than marketing. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Fifty-six minutes of onboarding for people given Canva through an enterprise account. Product training with a specific audience.
Not independently verified
The agency-facing version of Semrush’s product orientation, same length at twenty-one lessons, framed around client work rather than a single site. Free with a Semrush account.
Not independently verified
Colorado Boulder on giving feedback, a narrowly scoped course on the management skill people most often get wrong. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
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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