A two-day course your employer paid for, a free online class you finished over a few Sundays, the internal workshop on the new finance system. None of them ended in an exam or put letters after your name, and all of them are in your head while you look at your CV and wonder whether they count. Some do. Most of a typical list does not, and telling them apart is easier than people assume.
What earns a course a line
Learning with no credential attached has one weakness on a CV: nobody can check it. A degree has a registry behind it and a certification has an exam. A short course has your word. So the course has to justify its space some other way, and four questions do most of the sorting.
- Is it recent? Tools, regulation and methods move. A course from the last three or four years reads as a current skill. One from 2013, on software that has been rebuilt twice since, reads as history.
- Is it relevant? It should answer something the job advert asks for, ideally in the advert's own vocabulary.
- Is it substantial? Days or weeks rather than an afternoon, or a shorter format that ended with a project you had to hand in.
- Have you used it? This one outweighs the rest. A course you applied in a real job is worth ten you only completed.
Four yeses make a strong line and three make an acceptable one. If the answer to the second question is no, the course comes off, however good it was.
One point of vocabulary before going further. The completion certificate a platform emails you at the end is not a certification. If there was a proctored exam, a licence number or an expiry date, you are in different territory, and our guide to certifications on a CV covers that ground with its own rules.
The fifteen two-hour courses problem
You know this list when you see it. Introduction to Python, Digital Marketing Basics, Project Management Fundamentals, AI for Everyone, and eleven more in the same key, all from one year, all about two hours long.
Add it up. Thirty hours is less than a working week, and spread across fifteen lines it takes more room than your current job. The reader does not see curiosity. They see someone collecting badges, or someone trying to fill a short page, and I think that reading is usually fair.
The fix is not to hide everything. Keep the two or three courses that pass the four questions, the ones with some weight to them. For the rest, the skill goes in your skills section without the course name: write "SQL", not "Introduction to SQL (2 hours)". Anything that maps to no skill the job needs gets deleted.
Before:
- Introduction to Python, 2 hours
- Digital Marketing Basics, 3 hours
- Project Management Fundamentals, 2 hours
- (twelve more lines)
After:
- Training: Data Analysis with Python, 6-week online course with a final project, university MOOC platform (2025). Agile Project Delivery, 3-day classroom course, external provider (2024).
Notice the word "online" in the second version. If a well-known university's name is attached to a free class hosted on a platform such as Coursera or edX, say what the format was. Leaving it vague invites the reader to assume you were on campus, and that assumption tends to collapse in the first interview.
In-house training counts, if you translate it
Plenty of people leave employer training off because it feels unofficial. That is a mistake. When a company takes you out of paid work to teach you something, it has made a choice, and some internal programmes are selective: you get in because a manager nominated you, not because you clicked a button.
The trouble is the name. "Horizon Academy Level 2" means nothing to anyone outside the building. Translate it into the subject, the length, who delivered it and how people were chosen, if they were.
Before:
- Horizon Academy Level 2
After:
- Internal people-management programme, 8 days over 6 months, 12 participants nominated by directors (2024)
Two limits apply. The compulsory modules everybody clicks through, fire safety, data protection awareness, the annual security refresher, do not belong on a CV unless the role is about exactly those things. And if the training covered a proprietary system or a confidential method, describe it generically. "Internal scheduling platform" is enough.
If your profession expects you to log CPD hours, resist pasting the log. One summarising line does the job: "CPD: 35 hours in 2025, mainly contract law updates and mediation." The figures there are only an illustration. A hiring manager wants to know you are current and what you chose to stay current in, not the date of every webinar.
One heading, a year on each entry, and the right position
Put everything under a single heading, "Training" or "Professional development", and cap it at three to five entries. Each entry follows the same order: subject, format and length, provider, year. The year is enough, since a month adds nothing. For something still running, write "in progress, due to finish December 2026". An unfinished degree raises different questions, and we deal with those in a separate article.
Do not mix these entries in with your degrees. A six-week online course sitting between a bachelor's and a master's implies an equivalence that does not exist, and readers notice. The education section has its own conventions, which our guide to the CV education section sets out.
As for position, the general case is simple: below experience and education, towards the bottom of the page. There are two exceptions.
- Career changers. The short course is sometimes your most recent and most relevant evidence. Move it up, directly under your profile.
- Early-career candidates. A long course with a real project can sit above an unrelated part-time job.
This section should change with each application. Keep a master list somewhere private, and choose from it according to the advert in front of you. LinkedIn works on a different logic, where a longer record does less harm, and we cover the profile's certifications section elsewhere.
When the course belongs inside an experience bullet
The best place for a course is often the line that says what you did with it. Suppose you took a two-day negotiation course in 2024 and reworked your supplier contracts the following quarter. Those two facts belong together, under the job where it happened.
Before, in the training section:
- Negotiation Skills, 2 days (2024)
After, in the experience section:
- Renegotiated three supplier contracts after a 2-day negotiation course (2024), cutting annual cost by 8 percent
The 8 percent is invented for the example. The rule for splitting is short: if the course produced a visible result in a specific job, it goes in that job and you do not repeat it lower down. If you have not used it yet, it stays under the training heading.
Moving it also solves the problem this article started with. A course on its own rests on your word. A course followed by a result your former manager can confirm is a fact.
Three courses you have used beat fifteen completion certificates.
Expect the interview to test whatever survives. Every course on the page is an invitation to ask what it covered, and if you could not talk about it for two minutes, cut it now.
A twenty-minute edit
- Write down everything you have taken in the last five years, in-house training included.
- Strike whatever has no connection to the role you are applying for.
- Strike compulsory modules and anything under a day, unless it ended in a project.
- For each survivor, look for the job where you applied it and move it into that bullet.
- Group what is left under one heading with format, length, provider and year.
If you build your CV from your LinkedIn profile, with a tool such as Postulit for instance, check what the profile's courses list carries across. A profile accumulates for a decade. A CV should not.