Partner Spotlight
Online learning is helping this social worker drive change
This article was originally published by Verizon. The Verizon Skill Forward program is a collaboration between edX and Verizon aimed at providing tuition-free, career-enhancing online courses focused on high-demand skills to facilitate long-term career growth.
For two decades, licensed clinical social worker Jesse Coudray has dedicated his career to helping individuals navigate some of life’s toughest challenges. Currently a supervisor providing mental health services to children and families in Trenton, New Jersey, Coudray is focused on increasing his impact to drive lasting, systemic change. “I want to be in a higher ranking position to enact better social change on a policy level,” Coudray explains.
Pursuing that goal prompted Coudray to pursue an MBA, funded by his employer, but he also recognized a need for more specific knowledge and accreditation. While exploring ways to supplement his degree, Coudray came across the tuition-free Verizon Skill Forward program. He initially couldn’t believe that highly reputable schools were offering self-paced, online courses and professional certifications at no cost.
He immediately dug into the program, earning 16 certifications to date. “The [certifications] balance out my clinical experience with business expertise,” Coudray explains. He specifically sought to ramp up his expertise in finance with certifications in financial accounting, corporate finance and free cash flow analysis. He also became an ISCEA Certified Supply Chain Analyst, a globally recognized credential that can cost upwards of $1,000, but was free to Coudray through the Skill Forward program.
As far as soft skills go, Coudray completed a leadership certification from Harvard University, which he considers among the best he’s ever taken, and is already applying its lessons in his current supervisory role. “I've taken a number of leadership courses, from military to business to coaching to executive,” Coudray says. “The Harvard course explored adaptive leadership — how to diagnose a particular issue that would require leadership — and organizational strategies.”
In addition to balancing out his MBA, Coudray also used Skill Forward to pursue areas of personal interest and broaden potential career opportunities, such as his most recent certifications in sports business management.
“One of the things I’m really into is fitness and health,” says Coudray, who is an avid rock climber. “I have a colleague who is a psychologist who works with a professional sports league. He’s looking for somebody who can do therapeutic work with the athletes. I am looking to possibly shift into that direction and meld it with my therapeutic degree.”
As Coudray has successfully found a way to use different learning paths to achieve professional and personal goals, his social work background has led him to consider how those with limited access to higher education might leverage the Verizon Skill Forward program to broaden their own horizons. “Build your skills, put it on your resume. School is getting really inaccessible, and having free access to education can really help somebody,” Coudray says.
Having used the program alongside formal education, he recommends Verizon Skill Forward as part of an overall strategy for advancement. “I must have told 100 people about [Skill Forward],” says Coudray. “It’s great because you have access to all these schools, all this education.”
“I always look to challenge myself to be better, to grow, to progress,” Coudray adds. “In social work, I use all that to help more people — and that includes Verizon Skill Forward courses.”
Verizon has a goal of helping 50,000 individuals prepare for jobs of the future by 2030, offering technical and professional pathways to accelerate skill building for in-demand tech careers. The Verizon Skill Forward program offers tuition-free training to help people advance their careers and improve their economic mobility. Participants can access more than 250 courses spanning 84 unique professional certificate programs to pursue high growth jobs across the in-demand areas of AI, business, coding, communication, finance, IT and more. To sign up or learn more, visit Verizon Skill Forward. An individual user's experience may vary and results are not guaranteed.
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