My Experience with Taking Online Courses at IBMI Berlin

Basic management skills are essential in pretty much all jobs nowadays. This is the reason why I, a developer at Sony, was interested in broadening my horizon and learning some core business skills.

I stumbled upon IBMI on social media. I was drawn towards taking the project management program there since I want to start taking over more projects at my job and think that their program seems really affordable and fast-paced. Their entire project management program (which consists of 4 online short courses) costs less than USD 50 and only takes 2 hours per course to complete. Personally, I do like the idea of learning essentials very fast rather than learning each and every forgettable detail in month-long courses.

I started with taking a single course first (Basics of Project Management) to see what it would be like. The payment process is very simple and you’ll get access to the course in a matter of seconds.

Before taking courses with IBMI you should keep in mind that these are not live video sessions or anything like that. You will get access to written content (see screenshot below). The content is well-structured, well-written, and includes lots of graphs and tables. The course also features a lot of examples and keeps it simple — you do not need any experience or business studies background or anything like that. The content focuses on tools that are actually applicable in the real world which I really liked.

There is no time limit for completing the course. After contacting customer support, IBMI confirmed to me that users have lifetime access to the courses they buy. So you can even complete your course weeks, months, or even years after purchasing them. Their customer support typically takes 1–2 days to answer via email. There is no telephone support that I could find.

After browsing through the course content, you have to pass a short quiz (you can retake the quiz as often as you want so there is no pressure). I then received my course certificate (see below). The certificate includes a unique code. This is very important because it can be checked by employers and guarantees its authenticity.

IBMI encourages you to take several courses in the same field in order to get a program certificate. Since I enjoyed the first course, I decided to buy the other three remaining courses of the program (Risk Management, Change Management, and Leadership and Team Development) in order to pursue the Project Management Program Certificate. This is what my student account area looked like while completing the last of the four required courses:

The other courses went as smoothly as the first one. It took me approximately 2 hours to complete each course. Upon completing the last remaining course, I was able to download my program certificate (you will have to click on “My Programs” in your user account section). The program certificate looked like this and of course, also includes a unique ID:

Last but not least they give you a short tutorial on how to add your newly acquired certificate to LinkedIn (see here). It will look something like that for the Project Management Program which I took:

Conclusion

I hope this review gives you some ideas if you are currently considering taking a course at IBMI. Overall I am really happy with what they offer and I have to say that you will probably not regret taking these courses at their current price point. I really like the idea that everyone — no matter their background — can learn some basic business skills in a short amount of time. IBMI really manages to compress all the important areas of traditional management studies into exciting and affordable online courses.

Pros:

• Very affordable (USD 10–15 per course depending on which course you want to take, USD 40–90 for a program)
• Fast-paced (only takes a couple of hours to complete a course
• Focus on the essentials and applicable stuff (not too much theory, not too unnecessary details)
• You can start with a single course and complete a program consisting of several courses later
• Course certificate included in price. Easy to share these on LinkedIn.
• Lifetime access
• Well written content with many examples
• Interesting course catalog (courses that focus on important business skills)

Cons:

• No telephone customer support (only email)
• No (live) video content