Any business owner or manager will tell you that one of the keys to success is continuous learning. It’s absolutely essential to keep up with new trends and best practices in order to stay ahead of the competition.
One of the most convenient ways to do this is through online courses. These courses offer a flexible way to learn, allowing you to study at your own pace and on your own schedule. In addition, they provide an opportunity to learn from some of the world’s leading experts in business management.
Of course, there are hundreds of online business management courses out there. How can you be sure you’re taking ones that are worth your time and money?
I’ve reviewed and ranked the best business management courses online based on a variety of important factors, including content, instructor, duration, and price (click here to learn about our entire Editorial Process & Methodology for product reviews).
What are the Best Business Management Courses Online in 2024?
Here are my picks for the top online business management classes you can take right now…
1. Business Fundamentals: Management and HR Management (Udemy)
Business Fundamentals: Management and HR Management | Udemy
If you want to own a business, lead a corporate team, or manage business operations and human resources, this course is designed to equip you with the crucial skills required for success in these roles.
Price
Regularly $54.99 but pricing varies
Duration
1.5 hours
This is a beginner-level course designed to teach the basics of different business and marketing strategies.
With this course, one can get started with their career in management and is meant to acquire skills needed to manage business activities and improvise their leadership skills.
It’s an excellent resource for aspiring managers, corporate executives, business owners, entrepreneurship students, and MBA grads. Staffing, controlling and directing, productivity management, value chain management, forecasting, recruiting, orientation, and training are just a few of the subjects covered in these online business management courses.
This course consists of 27 lectures, so it’s pretty in depth compared to some of the other options out there.
Not only that, this course provides a business management certificate upon completion and comes with 3 downloadable resources.
What You Will Learn
- Understand the skills required to become a good manager
- Analyze different management positions in a firm
- Comprehend different management skills, including stress management, recruitment, and selection
- Learn different skills required to encourage team and employees
- Acquire responsibilities of a manager
2. Practical Business Management: Strategy Business Game (Udemy)
Practical Business Management: Strategy Business Game | Udemy
Dive into the world of Business Management with this interactive course where you take on the role of CEO in a simulated market environment. Gain practical experience in strategy, finance, marketing, sales, human resources, and more.
Price
Regularly $27.99 but pricing varies (see our Udemy review)
Duration
Self-paced
Learn management skills in a fun and interactive way through this online business management course. It uses multiplayer business games where participants face various challenges, including strategic planning and financial, operational, and marketing issues.
You have the option of playing alone or in a group with your friends. There are two practice rounds and ten actual ones in the game. These rounds take place over six weeks, with a new game commencing each Monday.
What You Will Learn
- How to make pricing decisions
- How to perform financial analysis
- Understanding of production and stock management
- How to create and comprehend product life-cycle analysis
- How to implement competitor analysis
3. Exceptional Leadership: Leading at a Higher Level (Udemy)
Exceptional Leadership: Leading at a Higher Level | Udemy
This course is designed for professionals aiming to ascend to upper management, offering essential leadership skills for those seeking promotions or managing multiple levels of employees and feeling overwhelmed or uncertain.
Price
Available with a Udemy Personal Plan for $20/month
Duration
Self-paced
Taught by Ron Carucci, co-author of the best-selling book Rising to Power: The Journey of Exceptional Executives, this course is based on extensive research of over 2700 leaders.
It focuses on different aspects of promotions of people, including the skills that helped them move to this new position or the reasons behind their failure.
It talks about the most typical problems the leaders confront at higher positions and tips on overcoming them.
There are exercises at the end of each section that are great for identifying your leadership shortcomings and improving your skills.
What You Will Learn
- Understand how leaders avoid frequent traps that come along their way when maturing through different ranks in a company
- How to respond effectively to unsettling impacts of higher-level organizational leadership
- How to devise a strategy for one’s unique personality for a smoother transition towards a new position within the firm or in a new firm
- Adopt the four leadership characteristics that distinguish successful leaders: Context, breadth, choice, and connection
4. Time Management for Boosting Productivity (MEW Learning)
Price
Duration
56 lessons over 3.5 hours
Time management is one of the most important aspects of successfully managing a business. This course, taught by 3-time bestselling Amazon author Alex Genadinik, focuses on the basics of time management and how to use it to enhance productivity.
The course covers topics such as goal-setting, prioritization methods, delegating tasks, and how to make better decisions in order to maximize efficiency.
You’ll also learn about great tools and apps available to help with time management, and how to create an effective work environment.
Enroll today and start learning how to get more done in less time!
What You Will Learn
- How to automate and outsource various daily tasks
- How to prioritize tasks and make better decisions
- The importance of goal-setting
- The basics of delegating tasks
- Ways to eliminate distractions from your day
- How to use technology to optimize your productivity
- How sleep, exercise, and diet can impact your productivity
5. Business Foundations (edX)
Price
Free to audit (optional upgrade available)
Duration
The course can be completed in 6 weeks if users allocate 3 to 5 hours per week.
This course is amongst the best business management courses available online and is offered by the University of British Columbia (taught by Elicia Salzberg). This self-paced course is an excellent fit for anybody interested in earning a business degree or who aims to launch their startup and run it successfully.
With no pre-requisites, this introductory course offers an in-depth examination of the ideal company model. This course teaches how to understand and implement basic business operations, including human resource management, stock and supply, manufacturing and distribution, marketing, finance and accounting, media and PR, and other procedures.
You’ll have a broad grasp of business and how fundamental operations interact to aid strategic decision-making by the end of the course.
What You Will Learn
- Understand the framework of the company through its main components and operations
- Analyze the causes behind the disruptions in an industry
- Recognize the fundamentals of competitive dynamics in the industry
- Learn a basic understanding of financial statements
- Examine how various business activities interact and operate together
6. Business and Technology (edX)
Price
Duration
This extensive course is 12 weeks long (5-8 hours a week)
Taught by Brian Coyle and provided to edX by ACCA, this course helps you understand the role of accountants in ensuring that organizations run successfully, efficiently, and ethically.
The course material aids a participant’s understanding of a business’s environmental setting. Being amongst the best business management courses, this covers economic, legal, and regulatory implications on governance, employment, health, and safety, among other topics.
This course does not provide an edX certificate upon completion. However, after finishing the course, students will be better equipped to take the ACCA Accountant in Business (AB)/FAB’ test.
What You Will Learn
- Recognize the categories of businesses and their objectives and relationships with stakeholders and the outside world.
- Expand your knowledge of a company’s structure and important activities, such as corporate governance.
- Understand the functions of accountancy as well as auditing
- Gain important concepts of leadership, management, and human resource challenges such as motivation
- Importance of personal effectiveness and maintaining business ethics to build a foundation for the team and focus on organizational success
- How to pass the ACCA’s Business and Technology test (BT).
See our edX review to learn more.
7. Business Strategy from Wharton: Competitive Advantage (edX)
Price
Free to audit (optional upgrade available)
Duration
This intermediate-level course designed for both students and professionals takes up to 6 weeks (3-4 hours per week) to be completed.
This business management course online is provided by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. It is taught by Nicolaj Siggelkow, who is a renowned professor of management and has expertise in competitive advantage.
This course consists of 4 modules and teaches you how to build and implement plans to achieve a competitive edge in the market. It is designed to provide you with the skills and frameworks necessary to build and implement a successful plan.
What You Will Learn
- Assess your present and future strategic environment
- Determine the various client categories and what motivates them to purchase the things you sell.
- Learn about the obstacles preventing your company from achieving its full potential and learn different strategies to prevent them.
- For efficient organizational work, identify the core and secondary strategic activities that make up your organization and examine their relationships with one another.
- Determine how organizational effectiveness differs from strategic positioning.
8. Business Foundations Specialization (Coursera)
Price
$79 per month with a certificate upon completion.
Duration
Self-paced
Designed by Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, this business management course online can be accessed and completed on Coursera. Beginners will be able to discover fundamental business literacy, which they may use to transfer to a new profession, establish or enhance their own small business, or apply to business school to increase their knowledge.
This specialization course consists of 6 modules, each taught by specialized instructors of that course. Modules include introduction to marketing, introduction to financial accounting, managing social and human capital, introduction to corporate finance, and introduction to operations management. The last module consists of a capstone that allows you to apply the learned knowledge to a project.
What You Will Learn
- Understand customer loyalty through branding, customer centricity, and practical go-to marketing methods
- Examine financial statements and understand of influence of accounting standards and managerial incentives in the financial reporting process
- Manage people by creating roles and incentive systems that promote individual achievement in this course.
- Understanding the principles of finance in real-world scenarios, including personal money, business decision-making, and financial intermediation.
- How to examine and optimize business processes in services and manufacturing
9. Fundamentals of Finance and Accounting for Non-Financial Managers (AMA)
Price
This course has 3 pricing plans as follows:
- $2595 – Non-members
- $2345 – AMA members
- $2221 – GSA price
Duration
2 days
You can learn all the basics of finance and accounting in just two days. Seems impossible, right? Well, these online business management courses will not equip you with all the essential finance skills in just 2 days.
Make yourself more valuable to your firm and stand out by educating yourself with financial and accounting skills. Once this course ends, you will be making instructive choices while thinking about money. This session teaches non-financial managers the ideas, skills, and tactics, including write-offs and accruals, that may help them make each choice pay off on the job.
What You Will Learn
- Improve your grasp of the financial side of your job.
- Understand the financial principles of money and take steps to achieve your short- and long-term objectives.
- Use financial data to improve your bottom line and take the uncertainty out of your decision-making.
- Increase your value to the company by cultivating proactive working connections with finance specialists.
- Analyze a company’s financial position and management performance by calculating key financial ratios.
- Understand how to assess a company’s financial health using information from its annual report and 10-K report.
10. Introduction to Negotiation: A Strategic Playbook for Becoming a Principled and Persuasive Negotiator (Coursera)
Price
Free to audit (paid upgrades available)
Duration
Self-paced
This business management course online is offered by Yale and is taught by Barry Nalebuff, co-author of six books who has expertise in the area of negotiation, innovation, and game theory. This course will assist you in becoming a more effective negotiator.
This course builds a framework successfully for analyzing and guiding discussions. This approach aims to enable you to convince people using principled arguments. Furthermore, It will enable you to look under the surface of seeming disputes in order to find underlying interests.
By the end of this course, you’ll be better able to predict, analyze, and modify the behavior of individuals you compete against.
What You Will Learn
- Make negotiations by staying neutral
- Persuade people with your arguments
- How to deal with people having different perspectives on the same topic
- Provide ultimatums and remove alternate options
- Discuss important considerations about disclosing information, as well as potential bargaining strategies.
- How to use the game theory approach in negotiations
A Final Word
Taking online courses in business management can provide a number of advantages for both students and working professionals.
For students, online courses can offer a flexible and convenient way to possibly earn credits toward a degree or just to gain valuable skills for future jobs.
For working professionals, online courses can provide an opportunity to update and refresh their skills without having to take time away from work.
In addition, business management courses can help people develop important skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and time management.
Whether you’re a student or a working professional, taking online courses in business management can be a great way to improve your skills and knowledge.
Remember, most of these online course platforms offer free trial periods or let you audit classes at no cost, so take advantage of that to try out courses for free before committing.
Have any questions about this guide to the best business management courses online? Let us know by commenting below.
