You’ve made it your New Year’s resolution for 2025 to further your professional development and enroll on a course. But which courses are worth your time, and what courses provide the most return on investment (ROI)?
Usually, the courses that offer the most financial returns upon completion are the ones that are focused on developing tech skills or specific business skills, such as marketing, social media, project management, and data analytics.
These fields are traditionally accessible via undertaking a degree. But while there are employers who still do appreciate professionals that hold a bachelor’s or master’s degree, the value of having one is becoming more and more irrelevant to achieving one’s career goals.
In fact, over the past few years there has been a conscious shift from forward-thinking organizations, such as IBM, to abandon degree requirements in favor of skills-based hiring. This new trend has gained so much attention that even the U.S Department of Labor released a paper in November highlighting the positive results of hiring for skills and not educational achievements, and they outlined a step-by-step guide for employers to implement this practice within their organizations.
What this means for you is that career paths that you might have considered inaccessible, now have their barriers removed, and there are tons of online courses that you can complete to learn the skills necessary to succeed in the most popular high-paying, high impact roles.
7 Free Courses To Make More Money In 2025
Some courses are 100% free, while others are free only when you have a prior subscription or membership to the platform. Others offer discounts depending on your financial situation which can be as high as 90% of the original price (Coursera does this when you apply for financial aid). These courses offer a high return on investment and allow you to try a new career path without investing three or four years in something you’ll lose interest in, and without spending thousands of dollars and going into student debt.
At the same time, the skills these courses teach you enable you to make six figures or more through freelancing or being employed, within a relatively shorter time than it would take if you had to wait to complete your degree and graduate.
Here are a few free courses that teach high-income skills to enable you to increase your earnings as a freelancer or employee and make a six-figure income:
- Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate (Coursera)
- Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate (Coursera)
- IBM Data Science Professional Certificate (Coursera)
- Stanford University’s Machine Learning (via Coursera)
- Google Project Management Professional Certificate (Coursera)
- AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (AWS SkillsBuild)
- Full Stack Web Development Certification (freeCodeCamp)
If you’re wondering what salary ranges these courses can lead to once you learn and develop the skills they teach, take a look at a few of the potential job outcomes and their average U.S. salaries below:
- Data analyst: from $95,696 to $124,543
- Social media marketing manager: from $89,693 to $144,370
- AWS cloud engineer: $107,043 (from Coursera as no data was available from Salary.com at the time of writing)
- Full stack web developer: from $87,252 to $107,522
This year, learn something new and rebuild your career. As you take your professional learning and development to the next level, your income will mirror your efforts and consistency.