Is It Worth It To Learn On Udemy?

Udemy is an online learning platform aimed at professional adults. They teach you anything from development, business, IT & Software, Productivity, Personal Development, Design, Marketing, Health & Fitness, and Music. There are paid courses as well as free courses as well and you can get to learn in a structured environment which helps you to improve your learning ability. Sometimes I do get people saying that they could learn about eCommerce on Udemy, and it is senseless to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars where people could learn from Udemy for free or even just pay $50.

Udemy Instructors Are Not Successful Marketers

In my opinion, you can only learn technicalities in Udemy, but not formulas. If you want to learn about how to navigate or operate a WooCommerce or Shopify site, a Udemy course will go through all the different menu options and how to do basic operations such as how to install a theme or a plugin but never on the strategy to turn your WooCommerce or Shopify store into a profitable store.

Udemy instructors are not successful marketers themselves, otherwise, they wouldn’t be selling their information “cheaply” on Udemy as their time is definitely worth much more than $30 per student. They are merely teaching you things that you can easily find by searching on Google but then regurgitating them back to you in a video format so that you learn better.

This means that most Udemy instructors do not have the necessary experience of running a highly successful eCommerce store. They do not have the experience of sharpening their skills and perfecting their formula to be able to re-create successful eCommerce stores over and over again.

Read also: Making eCommerce Businesses Work for You

Udemy is like YouTube, which allows anybody to upload anything without any moderation at all. Can you really provide high-quality education without moderation?

The author of The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman says in the video below that to learn something, all you need is to practice for 20 hours.

On average, Udemy courses taught by men are 3.3 hours long, and 2.6 hours long for women. This goes to show that Udemy instructors do not even have the necessary content to be able to create a complete step-by-step training that”’ covers everything you need to be successful. If you need to be learning for 20 hours, do you honestly think that you can be proficient in a field by taking a Udemy course?

Good Instructors Don’t Teach On Udemy

Teaching on Udemy means that the instructor is tied to Udemy and their business of teaching is in control of Udemy. The instructors don’t own Udemy, they don’t own the brand, they don’t own the traffic, they don’t own the student accounts and they don’t own the policies such as the refund policy. They can ban the instructor account anytime and the instructor would lose all the content they have built for Udemy in an instant which Udemy has done multiple times such as Jerry Banfield who was a highly paid instructor on Udemy.

Teaching on Udemy is a huge risk for instructors and good instructors know how better to focus on building something long-term that they could control and is of their own.

Students on Udemy are frequently given discounts which could be applied to any courses, and that in turn takes the student away from the instructor as they get distracted by other instructors who are teaching similar courses.

Udemy also pirates courses from other trainers multiple times and it has happened to Troy Hunt who is a Microsoft Regional Director and Creator of haveibeenpwned.com, as well as Rob Conery who is a Senior Cloud Developer Engineer at Microsoft and Udemy does not take down these pirated content immediately.

Can Udemy Still Be Good?

I would say yes. Udemy can still be good if you just want to be learning the basic functions of how a tool such as WooCommerce or Shopify works. However, I wouldn’t count on it to take me further than that.

I feel that when it comes to learning, we must be extremely careful with what we learn as it is harder to UNLEARN than to learn. Learning the wrong things would set you back much further than just learning slowly which is why we should always be open to paying more for high-quality education than to learn from just about anybody. We need to look at the instructors or trainers and see if they actually have the credentials for us to learn from them instead of listening to anybody that seems to make sense as they may not know anything other than surface information underneath.

If you are interested to learn about how you can create a long-term sustainable and profitable eCommerce business, definitely do check out my eCommerce courses.