How to show online courses on your CV (and talk about them in interviews)

Rootlet

Wed, 14 Oct 2026

You've finished an online course and you can do something you couldn't before. The next step is making sure employers can see it. This guide covers where to put online courses on a UK CV, how to describe them honestly, how to back them up with evidence, and how to talk about them in an interview.

Why it's worth showing what you've learned

UK employers are still finding it hard to recruit people with the right skills. In the Department for Education's Employer Skills Survey 2024 (published July 2025), 27% of vacancies were hard to fill because applicants lacked the skills, qualifications or experience needed. The same survey found that about 1.26 million employees, 4% of the UK workforce, were judged by their employers to have a skills gap, meaning they weren't yet fully proficient in their job.

That doesn't mean a course will get you a job or a pay rise on its own. Nothing can promise that. But if you've built a skill an employer needs, it's worth making it easy for them to spot, and easy for them to believe.

Where to put online courses on your CV

The National Careers Service advises tailoring your CV to each job and highlighting the skills the employer has asked for. Courses fit that approach well, because you can choose the ones that match each advert.

Give courses their own heading

Add a short section called "Training and courses" (or "Professional development") below your education. If you're early in your career or changing direction and the course is your strongest evidence, you can move it higher, just as the National Careers Service suggests for education when you don't have much work experience.

Write each one in a single line

For each course, give the course name, where you took it, the year, and one short phrase about what you can now do. For example:

• Excel for Business Reporting, Rootlet, 2026: building pivot tables and dashboards from sales data.
• Introduction to Bookkeeping, Rootlet, 2026: recording transactions and reconciling bank statements.

Those are made-up examples to show the format. The "what you can now do" part matters most, because it turns a course title into a skill an employer recognises.

Only include what's relevant

Three courses that match the job are stronger than ten that don't. Leave out anything that doesn't help with the role you're applying for, and keep your CV to a length a recruiter will actually read.

Be accurate about what a course is

Most online courses, including the ones on Rootlet, are training rather than formal qualifications. Formal qualifications in England, like GCSEs, A levels or regulated vocational qualifications, have set qualification levels and are listed on the government's register of regulated qualifications.

So list online courses under training rather than qualifications, and don't describe one as a "qualification", "diploma" or "accredited" unless the provider says it is. If your course gives you a certificate of completion, you can mention it, but employers will usually care more about what you can do than the certificate itself. Being precise here builds trust, and an interviewer who checks will see you've been straight with them.

Back it up with something you made

The most convincing evidence of a skill is a piece of work that uses it. If you finish a course with a project, an employer can see your ability rather than take your word for it.

• Keep your best piece of work. A spreadsheet, a design, a short report, a bit of code or a before-and-after example.
• Make it shareable. Put it somewhere you can link to, such as a simple portfolio page or a shared folder, and add the link to your CV next to the course. Remove any real customer or employer data first.
• Use it at work if you can. If you're already employed, applying a new skill to a real task gives you an example with a genuine result, which is the strongest kind of evidence.

How to talk about a course in an interview

Interviewers often ask for examples of when you've used a skill. The National Careers Service recommends the STAR method for these answers: describe the Situation, the Task, the Action you took, and the Result, including what you learned.

A course plus a project gives you a ready-made STAR example. Here's how one might sound:

• Situation: "Our team was spending hours each month copying figures into a sales report."
• Task: "I wanted to find a faster way, so I took an online spreadsheet course."
• Action: "I used what I learned to build a pivot table that pulls in the data automatically."
• Result: "The report now takes minutes instead of hours, and I learned how to structure data so it's easier to analyse."

Again, that's an illustration. Use your own real example, keep it brief, and be ready for follow-up questions about how you did it.

Explaining why you took the course

Interviewers may also ask why you chose to learn something. A simple, honest answer works best: what you wanted to be able to do, and how you've used it since. Choosing to learn in your own time shows initiative, so there's no need to oversell it.

Adding courses to LinkedIn

If you use LinkedIn, you can add a course to your profile's "Licenses & certifications" section if you received a certificate, or mention it in a "Projects" entry alongside the work you produced. Keep the wording consistent with your CV, since recruiters often look at both.

A quick checklist before you apply

1. Pick the courses that match this job's advert.
2. List each one on one line: name, provider, year, what you can now do.
3. Put them under "Training and courses", not "Qualifications".
4. Link to a piece of work that shows the skill.
5. Prepare one STAR example for each skill you list.

Looking for a skill to add? Browse the courses on Rootlet and choose one that fits where you want to go next.

Sources

• Department for Education and Skills England (2025). Employer Skills Survey: calendar year 2024. Published 24 July 2025.
• National Careers Service. How to write a CV.
• National Careers Service. The STAR method.
• GOV.UK. What qualification levels mean.
• GOV.UK. Find a regulated qualification.