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New opportunities for our enterprise customers

RyanJaress

Instructors,

Earlier this year we shared that we've partnered with Google to bring their "Learn AI with Google" training plan to Udemy. This includes Google created training materials and professional certificates, now available alongside the thousands of courses our instructors have created. See our community post on this launch for reference.

Today, we are sharing that the Google Certificates Collection is now available on Udemy Business. Now, our enterprise customers and their employees can accelerate AI fluency and earn credentials from Google on the learning platform their teams already use, Udemy.

What this means for you as an instructor hasn’t changed:

Enhanced platform value: when learners see Google's involvement, it reinforces Udemy's reputation as a trusted destination for professional skills development, which can benefit all courses on the platform
Stronger course ecosystem: Google created content may help raise the overall quality bar and learner expectations, creating opportunities for instructors who deliver high-value experiences
More learners on the platform: Partnerships like this can attract new learners to the platform, though individual course performance will still depend on factors like course quality, marketing, and niche demand

What this means for our customers:

Industry-recognized credentials from Google that prove workforce capability
AI fluency at enterprise scale — createdby Google
The full range of skills your business runs on
No new vendor. No disruption. Just Udemy Business.
The Google Certificates Collection is delivered on Udemy Business — the platform your teams

We'd love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have, feel free to share your reactions below.

Teach on,
The Udemy Instructor Team

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Comments

ChrisBankes120

can instructors take these courses?

RNA

@RyanJaress, thanks for the update. How do such catalog expansions impact the revenue of current UB instructors overall since the UB has a pool mechanism? A separate simple explainer post with some worked out examples would be helpful.

RijulArora

Great move, team!

PuneetGupta453

While I appreciate that Google is now an "instructor" on the Udemy platform and its courses will be available to UFB customers, it also means that Google has effectively become a competitor within the same marketplace. Coursera has long differentiated itself by offering courses from established universities and large organizations, whereas Udemy's unique strength has traditionally been courses created by working professionals sharing practical, real-world experience. That niche appears to be weakening with moves like this.

How can an individual instructor realistically compete with an organization like Google? With its vast resources and massive YouTube ecosystem, Google has already expanded into structured learning through YouTube's Courses feature. It raises the question of whether, in the long run, Udemy risks enabling large brands to leverage its marketplace and audience at the expense of independent instructors.

If Udemy continues introducing more well-known brands as direct competitors, the perceived credibility and brand value associated with those organizations could make it increasingly difficult for independent instructors to compete—similar to the dynamics seen on Coursera.

Unless Udemy takes deliberate steps to support and differentiate individual instructors—whether through stronger instructor branding, improved discoverability, dedicated promotional initiatives, or other mechanisms—the platform risks eroding one of the very qualities that made it distinct in the first place.

WilliamStewart

I believe this comment is very wise. I feel obligated to add to it. As some here know, I love Udemy and believe it is more important than individual instructors, or investors. I have, at some cost to me, been fighting for it's unique value on these forums for several years.

Udemy is a gift to the world. It is a technical implementation of democracy. It is what the Internet was always meant to be - making information available from anyone to everyone. I remember how ten years ago the excitement among instructors, the opportunity to combine doing well with doing good, created such powerful synergistic passion that the Udemy we know blossomed into an incredibly valuable repository. It was those intangibles, instructor passion, that drove this creation.

Udemy proved that the wisdom of distributed individuals far surpassed that available in centralized universities or corporations. It proved that proposition. It turned out that among the millions of individuals sitting in their homes around the world had more talent than the centralized few at the top.

And then it paid those individuals fairly to unleash that talent. And so Udemy grew very rapidly. Passion was the engine.

If anyone from Coursera leadership is reading this, I can only recommend that they carefully ruminate on these intangibles. I don't believe Udemy is a now mature system that can be seen as a collection of financial cogs and levers. Having been here since 2017, I see the important parts of Udemy, the parts that drove the financial growth, as being exceptionally human and intangible, as fragile as a plant in a garden, and needing that level of care.

And so, at a minimum, careful thought should be given to this. Is Udemy a department store, that sells anything? Stanford will always have courses. Google will always have courses. They can always be bought from Stanford and Google. But what Udemy has is very, very, very different. And unless those intangibles are deeply, deeply understood, and preserved, and nurtured, then they will not be around forever.

And possibly the new leadership does not understand the continuity of these problems. I've lost count of the number of Udemy CEO's I've seen. I had one on one zooms with two of them. Zane understood, but he is now gone. I just urge the current leadership to do something hard, and subjective, and probably annoying, but critically important: understand the fragility of the individual instructor ecosystem, what created it, and what is needed to preserve it, and extrapolate to what will happen if it is lost, and factor that into your strategic planning.

I think it would be fair to say that the Udemy instructor community has not seen that level of understanding or planning for several years now. As I have argued elsewhere on these forums, I believe the arrows are reversed. It is precisely that declining passion that is the cause of the declining NRR and the financial challenges the organization has faced. Therein lies the problem, and therein lies the solution. As incredibly annoying and intangible and subjective as it may be.

Sometimes the most important thing you must do is the thing you least want to do.

With the greatest of constructive intent possible - Bill.

TheScottDuffy

What's the difference between Udemy and Coursera?

TheScottDuffy

Did Google sign UB's exclusivity agreement?

Or can Google post these courses to other platforms without risking deletion?

Key question: do they have to follow the same rules we do?

365Careers

How can we call this a marketplace if some publishers are given special above-the-fold placements? Are there other successful marketplaces that operate this way?

RNA

Seems catalog integration from offerings already on Coursera. Looks like other courses from other major players will appear soon. It all depends on question you raised about it being a level playing field or not. It has a very specific impact radius in terms of topics but for anyone in that radius it could be catastrophic. (TMI, left is Coursera, right is Udemy)

FrankKane

Hey! They have text in their images!

I agree it's going to be hard for instructors to compete with the authority these courses from big tech companies have. It's probably a matter of time before AWS does the same, which might hit me. In an effort to see the bright side though:

- Most of these companies don't really want to be in the training business in the first place (I know this firsthand)
- It does lend authority to the platform and increases its perceived quality. If that sells more UB licenses, then it's a tide that lifts all boats
- You'll notice these courses are very short (see point #1 above.) It's not hard to compete with them by producing more comprehensive content, and they won't be stealing that many minutes from us.

RNA

True, in general if the traffic is handled taking into consideration points you mention, only few are in direct competition for the pixels in result pages. I think these platforms had approached creators and instructors to build courses for them which they have posted online in past ( I assume you were among them ). These courses are starter kits not production grade stuff so even fewer would get impacted. Unfortunate but unavoidable now. The subsidized infrastructure and feature availability makes it harder to keep up them as well. A more symbiotic relationship between existing course creators in these topics and platforms might help but the production quality they demand leaves very few eligible. Also the GenAI angle keeps becoming a competition every time a new model releases. A good documentation with a decent AV by a model is lecture!

Also I am surprised that these companies don't post their annual developer conferences on Udemy or Coursera. A related courses tab next to a new feature being launched is match made in advertising heaven!

But the concern remains around will integration be handled cleanly in searches where a huge room for improvement has always been noticed. A crude implementation can ruin momentum for many inadvertently. And might be too late for some like me to stay afloat in this marketplace if things go further south suddenly for a few more quarters. It would have been nice to see someone from management take a couple of minutes to assure why this is a value add and not a competitor as such.

SteveBallinger

Competing with brands will be an upcoming new normal as Coursera offers "Google’s Professional Certificates" from Google that cover a variety of topics like Python, Cybersecurity, Data Analytics etc. Plus other brands like AWS taught by AWS employees for example. Maybe Udemy Business customers would want these options, even if they love us independent instructors. Now I am up for competing with any brand as an independent instructor because we can be 1. Independent. My courses are not trying to sell Gemini (Even if subtly) for example and Udemy instructors are not employees of a brand so can garner more trust 2. We can move faster. Now, if the playing field is tilted like special positioning at the top of multiple landing pages like @365Careers noted, not having to follow the same policies as @FrankKane and @TheScottDuffy noted that is discouraging although I understand the negotiating power of large brands. The cadre of independent instructors is a strong brand as well. Certainly helped Udemy grow Udemy Business without a single big brand.

MarinaT

Hi Scott,

Thank you for your question. Because of the nature of the partnership, some Trust & Safety policies differ from those that apply to instructor content. However, these policies are still designed to ensure a good learner experience and compliance with legal requirements.

As we shared in the announcement, instructor content remains at the core of Udemy's platform, and partnerships like this are intended to strengthen the overall learning ecosystem and bring more learners to the platform, ultimately benefiting instructors as well.