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
Wharton’s combined finance and accounting specialization, the natural starting point of its business sequence. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Wharton’s introduction to financial accounting, part of its Business Foundations sequence. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Wharton’s introduction to marketing, taught by Barbara E. Kahn, Peter Fader and Jagmohan Raju across branding, customer centricity, go to market strategy and pricing. Free to audit, with the certificate requiring paid enrolment.
Not independently verified
Yale’s negotiation course, built around a strategic framework rather than around tactics. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Portfolio construction taught through Python, from a business school with a strong quantitative finance reputation. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
A single concept taught properly: the time value of money, which underpins every valuation and lending decision that follows it. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Intuit’s bookkeeping certificate, a route into paid bookkeeping work published by the company that makes the accounting software most small businesses already use.
Not independently verified
The University of Geneva’s investment management specialization, taught from one of the world’s private banking centres. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
A learning path for the administrator responsible for an Asana deployment, covering configuration rather than day to day use. Free with a free account.
Not independently verified
An IBM specialization introducing cloud, data and AI to a business rather than a technical audience, for people deciding what to adopt rather than how to build it.
Not independently verified
Four hours on lead management inside HubSpot, spanning segmentation, nurturing and qualification as the product implements them. Free on HubSpot Academy.
Not independently verified
Michigan on leading teams, one of the most taken leadership programmes published online. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Darden on the leadership demands of a business operating under current conditions rather than classic ones. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
IE Business School on the legal questions a technology startup meets, from formation onward. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Personal finance aimed specifically at young adults, covering budgeting, borrowing and the decisions that compound early. Free from The Open University, startable without signing up, with a free statement of participation on completion.
Not independently verified
Three hours of administrator training for HubSpot accounts, covering the configuration work that sits behind everyone else’s day to day use. Free on HubSpot Academy.
Not independently verified
A standard university microeconomics course from Illinois, covering how prices, firms and markets behave. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
A four-hour review of money, work and health at midlife, treating them as one set of connected decisions rather than three separate subjects. Free from The Open University, startable without signing up, with a free statement of participation on completion.
Not independently verified
A personal finance course produced with MoneySavingExpert, covering everyday money decisions rather than investing theory. Free from The Open University, startable without signing up, with a free statement of participation on completion.
Not independently verified
Darden on how the relationship between business and society is changing, and what that means for strategy. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
The OKR certification from the organisation that popularised the method, which makes it a primary source for it. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Stanford on analysing how organisations actually behave, taught through cases and competing theoretical lenses. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Northwestern’s leadership specialization, drawn from its management and communications teaching. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Wharton on applying analytics to workforce decisions, sitting between the data and management sections of this catalog. 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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