Wharton Business Foundations Specialization: Is It Worth It?

The Financestu team writes about stuff we think you’ll like. We have affiliate partnerships so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase. But don’t worry, it won’t cost you anything extra, and we promise not to spend it all on silly hats (maybe just some of it). Thanks for supporting our blog and questionable fashion choices.

Not sure if the Wharton Business Foundations Specialization is for you? You’ve come to the right place.

After:

• Reading more than 350 reviews on the Coursera page for the Business Foundations Specialization;
• Going over 2 hours of videos reviewing and ranking the best courses for core business skills;
• Reading through 10+ articles similar to this very one you’re reading;
• And scrolling through 25+ forum discussions and comment sections where consultants, business owners, and students exchanged opinions on the Business Foundations course…

This post assembles everything I found.

That being said, stick to the end to know what the biggest limitations of the specialization really are.

What Is the Wharton Business Foundations

The Specialization in Business Foundations from Wharton Online is a thorough program that will show you how top management consulting professionals and business owners make informed business decisions.

The program is taught through Coursera by a team of the most acclaimed professors in Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania (commonly referred to as Penn).

A member of the Ivy League, Penn is consistently ranked among the top 3 business schools by various ranking organizations, such as the Financial Times, QS World University Rankings, and U.S. News & World Report.

Wharton hosts the Specialization at Coursera, a leading online learning platform that gives you access to a plethora of courses taught by top universities and institutions, to make it easier to advance your career.

A specialization in Coursera means a series of related courses to form the optimal learning path. Concepts build upon each other to take you from beginner to advanced in a specific field as effectively as possible, as opposed to wasting time with unrelated courses.

The Business Foundations Specialization is composed of six courses:

#1) Introduction to Marketing

Marketing is an essential aspect of any business. It’s how you attract customers. In this course, you’ll learn:

• How to stand out from competitors while offering the same product.
• Why putting the customer first creates a positive experience and builds long-term relationships.
• The psychology behind pricing. Which digits? How high? Should it be rounded? You get a checklist of pricing tactics.
• How the best marketers in the world control customers’ perception.
• And much more…

You need no experience in this area to understand the concepts, as there are plenty of practical examples throughout the 10 hours of lessons.

#2) Introduction to Financial Accounting

Any business owner needs to understand the fundamentals of accounting. Throughout the 13 hours of this course, you’ll learn:

• How to analyze the three most common financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement) and how they’re connected.
• How to detect when managers use sneaky financial reporting tactics and creative accounting to paint a false picture of the financial situation of a company.
• The best ratios to make financial analysis easier.
• And much more…

You don’t need to be a business school grad to go through this course successfully, but it will certainly help.

The teacher (Brian Bushee) is really enthusiastic about the material. And his lessons are not only entertaining but also simple to understand. The technical quality of the course is top-notch.

#3) Managing Social and Human Capital

People are the most valuable asset of any business. Human beings are social creatures after all, right?

But they are also the most unpredictable and difficult to manage. As such, you need to incorporate this into a business. In this course, you’ll learn:

• How to motivate people to be proactive so the business runs on autopilot.
• How to design reward systems that motivate high performance and productivity.
• How to build a culture of effective time management (say goodbye to pointless time-consuming meetings).
• And much more…

Quiet quitting is a growing phenom. It is when an employee puts in the minimum possible effort to keep their job, but doesn’t go the extra mile anymore. This might mean not speaking up in meetings, not volunteering for tasks, and refusing to work overtime.

The problem is it’s really hard to catch this, so you need to know how to manage people and keep them motivated.

In this 7-hour course, the lecturers (who have real management experience at big firms) will teach you how.

#4) Introduction to Corporate Finance

How to value a company. How to evaluate investment decisions. What’s the optimal way to finance those investments—through debt or equity? Corporate finance studies all these questions.

Here’s what you’ll learn throughout the 7 hours of this course:

• Why money today is worth more than money tomorrow and how that impacts the valuation of a company or project.
• How top financial analysts at the biggest investment firms forecast cash flows, to avoid overpaying for a company, or selling for too little.
• How financial calculus translates into real-world personal finance decisions such as retirement savings, home financing, auto leases, and insurance. You will understand how banks calculate these payments so you can protect yourself.
• And much more…

The professor (Michael Roberts) is very patient. He spends a lot of time making sure you understand the equations, and their application.

However, make sure you complete the financial accounting course before enrolling in this, as otherwise you may have trouble keeping up.

#5) Introduction to Operations Management

This course takes approximately 14 hours to complete, and you will learn to analyze processes, optimize flow, and manage setbacks. More specifically:

• How to identify obstacles and eliminate inefficiencies in any business.
• How to optimize the trade-off between cost and quality through the efficient frontier.
• How to expose sources of waste in a business and design efficient processes for maximum output, reduced costs, and more customer satisfaction.
• And much more…

This is the best course in the whole specialization in terms of real-world applications.

The quizzes are challenging, but doable.

They aim to boost your problem-solving skills so you can quickly pinpoint how exactly to improve the operations of any business.

#6) Wharton Business Foundations Capstone

The capstone is a final project to wrap things up and bring all the concepts you learned in the previous courses together. It takes approximately 11 hours to complete.

What is the project about?

You’ll be challenged to develop a product or service, along with a full marketing, accounting, and financing plan.

Your fellow peers also taking the course will review your project, not a teacher. You can also use the discussion forums to help and ask for help (as with the previous courses).

Overall, the capstone gives you a taste of what it’s like to do actual real-world business opportunity analysis.

Who Is the Business Foundations Specialization For

The Business Foundations Specialization by Wharton is ideal for you if:

• You are an entrepreneur and know your product like the back of your hand, but aren’t great with business.
• You’re an aspiring product manager with no clue of where to start.
• You plan to get an MBA and want to get your feet wet without the financial commitment.
• You are a management undergraduate unsure of which career path to take.
• You didn’t go to business school but are looking to transition into a management consulting career or similar.

While you don’t need an accounting background, you do need a good understanding of high-school-level maths.

And you need to put in effort, especially to complete the quizzes. Do not enroll if you plan to run through the Specialization just so you can add it to your resume.

Every minute of the lectures is value-packed, so you must pay attention or you will get lost very quickly—especially if you have no business background.

How to Enroll

To enroll in the course, simply go to the Business Foundations Specialization Coursera page and click the Enroll for Free button.

The specialization is not free though. It costs $79/month.

But it is included in Coursera Plus, which costs $59/month if you’re in the United States. (The price varies according to your location and currency. You can click below to check the price in your country.)

You get a free trial of Coursera Plus for 7 days that you can cancel anytime without having to pay any fees.

Coursera Plus is a subscription plan from Coursera that gives you unlimited access to 7,000+ courses and specializations from 170+ leading companies and universities, at no additional cost.

Once the free trial expires, you have the standard subscription plan options: monthly or annual. Select what you prefer and enter your payment information to complete the enrollment process.

After you enroll, you will have access to all the materials, including video lectures, readings, quizzes, and assignments.

You will also be able to interact with other students in the course through the discussion forum. You’ll find a lot of threads in there, as over +175,000 have already enrolled. These will help you a lot in case you face issues completing the quizzes.

Because Coursera charges a monthly fee rather than a fixed price, you can save money by completing the courses faster.

Pros & Cons

Here are 5 reasons to pursue the Wharton Business Foundations specialization certificate:

• Top university: Wharton is the top #1 business school in the world (yes, above Harvard) according to the Financial Times. You’re getting direct contact with the best finance professors, who have real skin in the game.
• Self-paced: You take the courses at your own pace, as you’re able to pause, rewind, and review concepts as you need. You can learn whenever it fits your schedule and mood. Not to mention the faster you complete the course, the less you pay.
• Tailored for real-world application: Unlike school classes that focus on concepts that only apply to perfectly predictable theoretical worlds, this program teaches you skills you can immediately apply to real-world projects at work or business endeavors you’re pursuing. Also, a lot of the concepts covered in the courses are not offered by universities.
• Shareable certificate: You earn a Wharton Business Foundations certificate once you complete the specialization. You can share it in your LinkedIn profile, CV, or other documents. As everyone has a degree nowadays, certificates are a great way to stand out in the job market because they showcase your proactiveness.
• Free trial: The 7 days Coursera offers you eliminate all risks of joining a course you don’t find valuable. Like buying a house, you get to make your decision only after looking at the inside of it.

And here are 2 things Wharton and Coursera could improve:

• Poor presentations: You will notice a contrast from some lecturers to others. In some cases, the presentations are visually appealing and the lecturer is a great communicator (Introduction to Corporate Finance, for example). In others, the PowerPoints are boring, the audio quality is poor, and this makes it harder to focus than it needs to be (Introduction to Operations Management).
• Problems with the quizzes: Some quizzes don’t take into account different answers to the same question (or different wording of the same correct answer), leading to multiple attempts to pass despite knowing the right answer. On top of these technical problems, sometimes there’s a disconnect between the lectures and what’s asked in the quiz.

With these in mind, what’s the verdict?

Wharton Coursera Business Foundations: The Verdict

As a business owner, you need a strong foundation of knowledge so you can steer your projects in the right direction.

The Business Foundations Specialization by Wharton (Coursera) is value-packed, and taught by experts in the field. It is well-paced and emphasizes practical skills you can apply to real-world business situations.

Each module has an introduction that articulates clearly what you can expect to learn. In the end? You get a summary that beautifully wraps up what you learned in a quick overview just before the quiz.

While some quizzes have technical issues, this won’t prevent you from building a sturdy foundation of business knowledge. Why?

Because you learn a variety of topics, taught by some of the most prestigious professors in the world. You will gain a lifelong understanding of how a business generates money, from start to finish.

This will help you reach your goals faster, whether you’re a business owner, manager, or consultant.

As to the price, it’s very cost-effective. You’re getting top-notch content from some of the brightest business minds, for a fraction of the cost of an industry-average business course ($300-$600). More value for less money.

No wonder over +175,000 people have enrolled. Tap below to join them:

Have you enrolled? What did you think of the courses? Leave your comments below.

Have any further questions I didn’t answer? Let me know and I’ll get back to you in less than 24H.

Also, if you have enrolled and need any help understanding the course’s content, feel free to contact me.