An MBA is one of the most popular postgraduate programs pursued by students after completing their undergraduate degree. It is open for all the students from any academic background—for instance, even those with a B. Tech degree are also eligible to get admission in an MBA. The choice to pursue an MBA often depends on a student’s career goals and area of interest.
Now, coming to an interesting question: What short-term courses can a student take before starting an MBA?
There are various short-term courses available for a student to adapt and take an admission. However, if you truly want to get the advantage of your MBA, we suggest gaining some work experience first. A professional environment helps you better understand organizational structures, workplace culture, and some basic business challenges. This real-world experience makes it much easier to grab the concepts taught in an MBA program.
Regardless, if you still prefer to take up short courses before your MBA, you should focus on developing the best command in MS Office skills—learn PowerPoint, both basic and advanced Excel. These are essential tools, and competency in them is a highly valued skill to get a job in any organisation.
Here are a few more short-term courses worth considering:
Financial Accounting: It’s important to have a basic understanding of accounting principles. Many students choose to intern or work with a CA firm to build these skills. They can learn some accounting software such as Tally & Quick books etc.
Financial Modelling: If a student is planning to choose any accounting degree or to do CA then we suggest they should study this financial modelling as they will learn how to build three – statement models as it’s done on wall street. A student can explore best practices, model flow and design, also they can strengthen their excel skills. Udemy has introduced financial modelling for beginners. On the other side we have some more platforms which can provide short duration financial modelling courses such as CFI Education, Alison, NSE, Linkedin etc.
Marketing Elements: There are various short term 06 month or 01-year online programs which can help a student to learn the digital marketing strategies and tools. Also, In Marketing they can learn about consumer behaviour and branding etc.
Product & Design: This is also one of the popular short term courses which can make you understand how to create or design a new product for your consumers. It involves the generation and development of ideas through systematic process. A student can find a resource library online by the name of Figma which has a comprehensive Guide of product design.
Networking: Several short-term courses for mba students are available online for understanding the network and learning how to build professional networks. They have a duration of approx 06 months to 01 years.
Here are some examples for short term courses which a student can choose:
- Google, Connect and protect: Networks and Newtwork Security
- IBM. Computer Networks and Network Security
- NVIDIA. Introduction to Networking
- Cisco Learning and Certifications. Network Security
Communication Skills: For learning good business communication skills, you will find some short- term personality development and communication improvement courses, through which an individual can get confidence and understand the business language.
By pursuing this course, a student can improve their communication skills such as presence, covers persuasion and messaging fundamentals. Also, they can learn team work skills.
There are various platforms which are providing Effective communication courses with certifications such as Great learning, Coursera and Alison etc.
Generative AI: This is also another small certification course, which is in the market these days. We have a few courses online such as AWS Certified AI practitioner, NVIDIA Generative AI LLMs Certification, Blockchain Council Certified Generative AI Expert, GSDC Generative AI Foundation Certification etc. As we mentioned above, there are various online platforms which provide these small duration courses, but we recommend NVIDIA DLI’s free online courses which provide deep learning of AI, ML etc.
Digital Marketing: This course provides basic and practical knowledge of online marketing strategies in a liquidized format. An individual will cover and learn some key fields such as SEO, content marketing, social media, paid advertising.
Data Analysts: Data analyst interprets and analyses data to help organizations make correct business decisions. They use various tools to identify trends, patterns and insights from data.
If a student is interested in this area then they can go for a short term course and understand the basic tools such as Google analytics, Power Bi, Excel, Google Trend, SQL, Tableau etc. this is a good option for those who seeking to upskill, reskill and would like to start a new career.
Prompt Engineering: Prompt Engineering is mainly for crafting the best possible instructions (prompts) for AI models, so that AI can understand what you want and provide the desired output. For putting something accurate for getting the perfect output on chatgpt, a person needs to know the right prompt. This requires understanding the model’s behaviour and crafting prompts that are clear and precise.
Conclusion:
We have highlighted major short-term programs, but there are plenty of short-term courses available online through which an individual can improve their skills as per their interest before pursuing an MBA or PGDM. Also, the duration of the course would be approx. 03 month, 06 month or maximum 01 year for all these short term courses. A person can choose the courses as per their interest in the field.
