Google Creates a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months

In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more digital and face mounting cyberattacks.

Offered on Coursera’s educational platform, the new Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate features eight online courses, which will collectively help students learn how to:

• Understand the importance of cybersecurity practices and their impact for organizations.
• Identify common risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, as well as techniques to mitigate them.
• Protect networks, devices, people, and data from unauthorized access and cyberattacks using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools.
• Gain hands-on experience with Python, Linux, and SQL.

The Cybersecurity Professional Certificate also now includes six new videos that explain how to use AI in cybersecurity. The videos cover everything from using artificial intelligence to help identify bugs and system vulnerabilities, to refining code and prioritizing alerts with AI.

Students can take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. (Above, you can watch a video from the first course in the cybersecurity certificate program, entitled “Foundations of Cybersecurity.”) However, if you would like to receive a certificate, Coursera will charge $49 per month (after an initial 7‑day free trial period). That means that the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, designed to be completed in 6 months, will cost roughly $300 in total.

Once students complete the cybersecurity certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. As a perk, students in the U.S. can also connect with 150+ employers (e.g., American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, T‑Mobile, Walmart, and Google) who have pledged to consider certificate holders for open positions. According to Coursera, this certificate can prepare students to become an entry-level “cybersecurity analyst and SOC (security operations center) analyst.”

You can start a 7‑day free trial of the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate here.

Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.