MIT Has Released a Bunch of Free Courses: Discover 5 To Boost Your Tech Career

The world of work is changing––rapidly.

Thanks to the advent and rapid adoption of generative AI, tech stocks had a bumper 2023, with the share price of the Big Five (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft) leaping by 60% from the start of that year. 2023 was also a smash success for chipmaker, Nvidia, which saw its shares triple in price.

And while adoption isn’t even across the board yet, corporate America is sitting up and taking notice. At JPMorgan Chase, for example, the company said it had 600 machine-learning engineers, with AI working on more than 300 different internal applications.

A recent study from UKG found that 71% of C-suite leaders said that advancing their use of AI is either a high or medium priority for their organization, with 62% of executives noting that they are worried they’re not moving fast enough with AI.

That has led to some companies doing “AI washing”, aka exaggerating the amount of AI technology they use in their products or services.

While some companies might not be entirely truthful about their motivations and use of artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies, what is increasingly true is that in an AI future, tech workers will need to upskill.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) says that “the 2020s are becoming the decade of development for employees and employers in terms of skills and career progression”. Its most recent Future of Jobs Report identified that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years, and six in 10 staff members will require training before 2027.

Upskilling for free

Key skills to acquire will include new technology capabilities, but the WEF has also identified key human skills such as analytical and creative thinking, as well as resilience, flexibility and agility, motivation, and self-awareness. AKA, the things that artificial intelligence (so far) can’t do.

If you’re thinking about some upskilling, then one great place to begin is MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) platform.

A free and open space to learn, OCW contains material from thousands of MIT courses across every MIT department and degree program, ranging from the introductory to the most advanced graduate level.

Courses include a syllabus, instructional material (such as lecture notes or a reading list), and learning activities like assignments or exams. You can use all the courses at your own pace, and there is no enrollment fee or date to complete by––useful for those working in busy, pressurized roles.

A huge range of computer science, engineering, and technology courses are available, across topics such as machine learning, generative AI, Python, deep learning, cognitive robotics, data science, and much more, all for free.

If upskilling to get a new job is on your 2024 agenda, then the courses above are a great start. And your job hunt is made far easier too thanks to the HackerNoon Job Board. It contains thousands of interesting tech roles, like the three below.

1. DataAnnotation is seeking a Software Developer to train its AI chatbots to code. This flexible, part-time or full-time role allows you to choose the projects you want to work on, involves coming up with diverse problems and solutions for a coding chatbot, writing high-quality answers and code snippets, and evaluating the code quality produced by the AI model. You will need to be proficient in at least one programming language and able to solve coding problems (LeetCode, HackerRank).

2. Adobe is looking for a Machine Learning Engineer in San Jose. The salary range for this position is $135,200 - $250,900, and you will have either research or industry experience in building scalable data and ML platforms. In this role, you will have the opportunity to build a new GenAI foundation to change the creative landscape and will collaborate with data platform engineers and architects to seamlessly integrate low latency data pipelines into the ML platform for model training, as well as writing high quality, product level code that is easy to maintain and test following standard methodologies. Other tasks include designing and implementing reusable and scalable data-loading framework to support video and audio foundational model training in large-scale and distributed environments.

3. Python programmers looking for a new role can consider this Python Developer role at SAIC in Chantilly. You’ll be experienced, results-oriented, and mission-driven, with a specialized focus on data engineering in order to perform data model design, data formatting, and ETL development optimized for efficient storage, access, and computation in support of national security objectives. A solid understanding and experience with developing, automating, and enhancing all parts of the data pipeline to include ingestion, processing, storage, and exposing data for consumption is required, along with a focus on improving inefficient tooling and adopting new transformative technologies while maintaining operational continuity.