Looking to boost your current career, impress a potential employer, or explore a new field of interest? Microcertificates can lower the cost and time barriers to earning a credential — and potentially kickstart a longer academic journey.
By earning a microcredential, you demonstrate proficiency in academic knowledge and in real-world applications, adding immense value to your experience and professional acumen.
Accelerated. Earn a Harvard credential in 2 courses.
Stackable. Apply courses toward a graduate certificate — or degree.
Actionable. Gain a new skill set for real-world impact.
This year’s microcertificate offerings offer advanced learning in a range of topics in sustainability, business management, and technology. Each set of curated course offerings seeks to help students deepen their existing knowledge and provide momentum for future growth.
No application is required for our microcertificates — you simply register for your first course.
Our business management microcertificates provide the opportunity to build specialized knowledge in financial technology, project management, and workplace wellbeing.
Project Management Methodologies
Learn techniques, methodologies, and frameworks to lead a complex project management process from beginning to end. You’ll gain fluency in applying Agile, waterfall, and Scrum methodologies and frameworks to a team-based setting.
Wellbeing at Work
Motivated and engaged employees are more likely to contribute to a positive workplace culture and increase overall effectiveness. In the Wellbeing at Work Microcertificate, you’ll learn how managers can promote balance, engagement, and positivity across professional settings.
Sustainability is all about the long term. Our selection of microcertificates each serve to address a different facet of sustainability, leveraging essential concepts, tools, and skills needed to apply to real-life problems.
Circular Economics
Gain insight into the viability of circular economics as a solution to the issues created by natural resource depletion. In this microcertificate, you learn how to incorporate circular systems with increased resiliency for both environmental health and business profits.
Life Cycle Assessment
Explore the increasingly important role that life cycle assessment plays in sustainable production and manufacturing. You’ll learn how to evaluate data, make key decisions, and gain proficiency using LCA analysis and software.
Regenerative Agriculture
Learn about a more sustainable approach to farming and grazing animals that improves soil health, combats climate change, and improves the nutritional quality of food. In this microcertificate, you’ll explore soil science and ecology and consider how to transform supply chains.
Sustainable Finance
Delve into how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are increasingly impacting financial decisions and gain the knowledge of key sustainability concepts and the skill to integrate them into financial decision-making.
Technology is an undeniably integral part of our world. Specialized skills in database management, application development, and data modeling are just a few of the valuable skills that can set you apart in today’s highly competitive job market. Our technology microcertificates offer the opportunity to deepen your knowledge and strengthen your skill sets.
Database Management
Interested in advancing or launching a career as a database developer, administrator, analyst, or architect? In this microcertificate, you learn to design, develop, and manage modern database systems, including relational and NoSQL databases.
Web Application Development
As the demand for web developers continues to grow, you can gain the foundational skills required to create and maintain modern web applications, programming, and complex web applications.
Data Modeling and Ethics
Explore the ethics, governance, and laws relevant to data science and artificial intelligence, including privacy, fairness, accountability, and transparency. This microcertificate is designed to provide you with the foundational knowledge and skills required to build ethical and effective data models.
A microcertificate offers a set of short, competency-based courses designed to help you build and demonstrate mastery in a given area. At Harvard Extension School, microcertificates offer a path to a credential that is shorter (only 2 courses), affordable, and highly focused on a skill set. Our microcertificates also stack toward related graduate certificates and graduate degrees.
At HES, our tuition is $3,220 a course. The whole microcertificate amounts to $6,440.
Microcertificates are designed for career accelerators who are interested in building a focused skill set in an accelerated timeframe.
Microcertificates are a great way to enhance your professional learning and development. Industries across the board are ever-changing and increasingly competitive. If you are looking to fill a skill gap and build confidence in your current field — or even explore a new one — microcertificates are a good fit.
The microcertificate curriculum consists of a small set of 2 to 5 tightly curated courses, from which you select 2. To earn the certificate, you complete the 2 courses at the graduate level, with a grade of B or higher, within 1 year. This short timeline will support momentum and reinforce the learning between the 2 related courses.
The courses featured in the microcertificates are taught by Harvard Extension School instructors who teach across Harvard and peer institutions and work as expert practitioners in their fields.
Visit our faculty page to meet some of them.
The completion of a microcertificate shows proficiency in specific industry competencies and awards academic credit at the same time. In a semester or 2, you can upskill or reskill to demonstrate initiative and develop new skills in your place of business. You also have the opportunity to explore new industries without a full career change — or jumpstart a longer academic journey.
We are here to help. Send us an email at microcredentials@extension.harvard.edu.
