Are Google Cloud Skills courses any good?

Are free courses any good? Or, more specifically, are free courses from Google Cloud Skills any good?

Part of being a freelance writer is to keep up with technology and this, unfortunately, includes AI, which I am not a fan of.

I think I came across Google Cloud Skills when I was searching for free or low cost tutorials for AI, because ignoring AI at this point in the game is just not possible. I am to avoid AI all together in my writing and to only use it sparingly to brainstorm ideas or for side hustles explicitly requiring it.

I found quite a few introductory tutorials about AI, Large Language Models and related topics on Google Cloud Skills so I set myself to complete as many as possible, as long as they were free of charge.

You can create either an anonymous or a public profile and I chose the latter (here). If you have a public profile other people can check which certificates you have obtained, which I think it’s quite useful, especially when you decide to share that information on platforms such as LinkedIn.

Having a public profile also allows you to see the leaderboard, which displays other people’s scores: basically, the more courses you complete, the more points you get and you go up a few spots on the leaderboard. This gamification element of learning can be quite motivational to help you complete more courses – ultimately, Google wants you to burn through the free stuff as quickly as possible because then you have to start paying for courses to continue on your learning path.

Chargeable courses include Lab sessions, where you put what you have learned into practice. I haven’t tried those, plus you need to allocate 1.5 hours of your time to complete them, while introductory sessions can be done within . More advanced courses can take more than 8 hours to complete, such as the Security & Identity Fundamentals course which requires 8.5 hours and 17 credits. Purchasing credits is not entirely intuitive, but according to Google’s subscription model a yearly contract worth $299 buys you 500 credits.

Did I buy any chargeable courses? Of course not!

Did I find the free courses useful? Let’s say the jury is still out. Showing that I’ve completed “Introduction to Large Language Models”, “Introduction to Generative AI”, “Introduction to Image Generation” and “Innovating with Google Cloud Artificial Intelligence” may get me more freelancing opportunities in the future. In the meantime, I have scratched the surface of a huge topic that everybody’s talking about.

In other words, I am getting to know my enemy. You see, if I am doing some research for an article I don’t go to an AI tool to provide me with some answers, as I don’t trust how reliable the information can be, so I do my own web searches comparing different sources to make sure I am not disseminating inaccurate information.

Is it worth it?