You're trying to become a coach on a budget. You've Googled around, and New Skills Academy keeps popping up with short, affordable life coaching courses that promise a certificate in under 15 hours. Sounds perfect, right?
Here's the thing. A cheap certificate isn't real training, and when it comes to New Skills Academy, there's a gap between the marketing copy and what students actually get.
So is New Skills Academy legit? In this review, we'll walk through their life coaching courses, their CPD accreditation, what real students say on Trustpilot, what investigative journalists uncovered, and who these courses are (and aren't) right for.
New Skills Academy review: pros and cons at a glance
Short on time? Here's the quick verdict before we dig into the details.
Pros:
- Affordable. Individual courses start at around £100 (about $120), with frequent sales
- Fully self-paced, no deadlines, lifetime access to most courses
- CPD-accredited, which can count toward continuing professional development hours in the UK
- Digital certificate of completion included
- Over 1 million enrolled students and a high Trustpilot score from positive reviewers
- Fine as a taster if you're curious about a topic before committing to a serious program
Cons:
- Not ICF-accredited, so it won't qualify you to apply for International Coaching Federation credentials
- Instructor credentials aren't listed. The About page shows only first names and avatars
- Many reviewers say lessons are narrated by a computerized voice and feel AI-generated
- No live coaching practice, no peer feedback, no real mentorship
- Schools Week investigated the platform and found misleading advertising about course equivalency
- SEND expert Sara Alston flagged inaccurate and outdated terminology in their teaching-assistant courses
- The in-house accreditation body (IVCAS) is owned by the same person as New Skills Academy, which is a clear conflict of interest
Bottom line: New Skills Academy is a legit e-learning business in the sense that you'll get what you paid for: a short video course and a certificate. But it isn't a substitute for a proper coach training program if you plan to charge paying clients.
What is New Skills Academy?
New Skills Academy is a UK-based online learning platform that offers courses you can take at your own pace on a wide range of subjects, from finance to lifestyle. If you dig deeper, you can even find niche topics like dog-related courses or an international massage diploma.
The goal is to make picking up skills for your dream job cheap and flexible, with certificates of completion at the end. Most courses are short video lessons (2–15 hours total) plus written materials that teach foundational skills or introduce new career paths.
It's not as well-known as Udemy or Coursera, but New Skills Academy has grown quickly and enrolled over a million students. The awards it gets tend to be about commercial growth rather than course quality, though.
All programs are CPD-accredited and mostly aimed at students or entry-level professionals who want to learn something new. Individual courses typically cost between $110 and $290, or you can get the whole library with an annual membership for $119.
The company's website mentions appearances in major publications, but if you actually click through, you'll notice the coverage rarely reviews the courses in depth. Most of it is about the founder, Chris Morgan. The Guardian, for instance, covered his personal story of going from gambling addiction to building the New Skills Academy brand.
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New Skills Academy courses for life coaches
Life coaching certifications have gotten much easier to access, with plenty of online, self-paced programs at a low price point. New Skills Academy follows the same model.
You can buy an individual coaching certificate course for about $120, or you can get the full course library for a year through their premium membership at roughly the same cost.
The platform describes its courses as "expertly designed," but there's very little info on who actually creates or teaches them. The About page lists only first names and illustrated avatars for the New Skills Academy team, so it's hard to assess instructor credentials.
Here's a closer look at what the coaching course curriculum includes.
Life coaching certificate course
New Skills Academy has a foundational life coaching certificate that takes about 13 hours to complete and costs £100.
If you're brand new to coaching, this gives you a broad overview of core principles and practical tips for working with clients. It covers the GROW model, basic questioning techniques, ethical guidelines, and different coaching styles. The final modules get into how to find early clients and how to price your services.
Like every course on the platform, it's fully self-paced with no live instruction or peer practice. You can't ask questions or try the tools in real time, but the video lessons give you a basic grounding in coaching.
Mindfulness diploma
There's also a Mindfulness Diploma at £100 with 11 hours of material. It introduces the core principles of mindfulness and how it supports emotional and physical well-being.
It covers mindfulness meditation, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and practical ways to use these approaches. You'll also look at how mindfulness plays into everyday habits, emotional regulation, parenting, leadership, and management.
Professional body healing coach certificate course
This course is only 3.5 hours long and costs £100. It takes a holistic approach and looks at the physical, mental, and emotional sides of well-being.
There are training videos on nutrition, diet, exercise, and natural remedies. Some lectures get into meditation, breathing exercises, mindfulness, and stress management techniques. You'll also learn how the immune system works and what autoimmune disorders are.
The curriculum promises to prepare you to assess and change negative beliefs and habits in clients and help them build resilience to stress. That's an ambitious promise for a 3.5-hour course, but it might work as a taster if you're interested in health coaching.
Spirituality coach certificate
The spiritual coach course costs £100, and the whole thing takes five hours to complete in your own time.
It focuses on helping people reconnect with their true selves and improve their well-being through spirituality.
The lectures don't follow a specific religion or spiritual system. Instead, they teach a mix of spiritual philosophies and concepts, like:
- Self-acceptance
- Releasing negativity
- Connecting with the universe
- The purpose of life
Some lectures also get into practical tools like meditation, breathing techniques, and systems like the chakras and karmic ties.
These foundational modules are meant to help you work with clients on managing stress, navigating life changes, and feeling more fulfilled.
Other certificates for life coaches
Besides the niche-specific courses, there are others that focus on general coaching skills. These include:
- Coaching and mentoring skills
- Success habits
- Marketing courses
- Mindful listening
- The science of happiness
- Anxiety awareness
There are also therapy-related courses like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). A quick reminder: these classes can give you background on various healing practices, but they don't qualify you to diagnose or treat people with mental or physical health issues.
If you want to compare more thorough course options, see our full list of free and paid coaching certification programs.
ICF vs CPD accreditation: what's the difference?
This is where a lot of new coaches get confused, so let's clear it up.
New Skills Academy's courses are CPD-accredited. That sounds impressive, but it means something very specific. And it's not the same as being ICF-accredited.
What CPD accreditation actually means
CPD stands for Continuing Professional Development. The CPD Certification Service is a UK-based body that reviews courses and confirms they meet general educational standards for continuing development hours.
CPD accreditation is useful in some regulated UK professions (teaching, nursing, HR) where workers have to log continuing development hours every year. The accreditation tells their employer the course counts as legitimate learning.
But CPD is a general educational standard. It doesn't check whether a course meets the standards of a specific profession like coaching. A dog grooming course, a coaching course, and a bookkeeping course can all be CPD-accredited.
What ICF accreditation actually means
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the biggest professional body for coaches in the world. It sets the competencies and ethical guidelines the coaching industry runs on.
An ICF-accredited coach training program has been reviewed against the ICF's specific coaching competencies. Graduates can apply for ICF credentials (ACC, PCC, or MCC) which are recognized worldwide and often required to work with corporate clients or coaching platforms.
New Skills Academy's coaching courses are not ICF-accredited. If you want to earn an ICF credential at any level, you'll need a separate ICF-approved program in addition to (or instead of) New Skills Academy.
Their in-house accreditation body: IVCAS
Here's something worth knowing. As Schools Week reported, some New Skills Academy courses are also accredited by an organization called IVCAS (an independent appraisal service).
The catch? IVCAS is owned by the same person who owns New Skills Academy. In other words, one of their "independent" accreditation bodies is basically reviewing itself. That's a straight-up conflict of interest, and it's the kind of thing you'd want to know before paying for a "fully accredited" certificate.
So, are New Skills Academy certificates recognized?
It depends on who you're asking.
For personal enrichment, general UK CPD logging, or adding a line to your CV, yes, the CPD-accredited certificate counts. It shows you completed a piece of structured learning.
For coaching credentialing bodies (ICF, EMCC, AC), corporate coaching rosters, or high-end private clients, no, a New Skills Academy certificate on its own isn't enough. Those gatekeepers want to see an ICF-approved program and coaching mentor hours.
New Skills Academy reviews
Curated testimonials
You can find testimonials curated by the site under each course. The ones from students of the life coaching certificate course point out that the lectures are easy to follow and well-structured.
Some appreciate the step-by-step structure of the content for beginners, and the extra modules on business concepts.
Online education is a competitive business. New sites in this industry usually gain traction by offering an incentive or nudging students to leave positive reviews. Those testimonials can then be curated on course pages and mirrored on independent review sites.
Let's dig deeper into what independent reviewers say about the platform.
Trustpilot: a mixed bag
If you look up New Skills Academy on Trustpilot, you'll find thousands of 5-star reviews, many praising how easy the courses are to access and the fact that there's no time limit.
Some students said the content helped them explore new career paths. As mentioned, most people taking courses on New Skills Academy are university students and entry-level professionals.
Another student said being able to read and watch the modules at the same time made it easy to work through the content.
On the other hand, there are plenty of less-than-impressed reviews on Trustpilot. Several students said they expected more from the curriculum based on how it was advertised, and that they could've found the same information through Google or a YouTube video.
Beyond the course content, several students pointed out that the information in the lectures isn't put together by real-life experts and is read by a computerized voice, which makes it hard to absorb.
Some raised the important point that practical tools like healing modalities can't really be learned through a platform like this. The courses lack practical explanations, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises for proper application.
More experienced students also raised concerns about the accuracy and language in subjects related to human behavior. Here's a review from a student who took the ADHD course.
The lack of neuro-informed language and inaccurate claims here are especially concerning because New Skills Academy attracts thousands of entry-level professionals.
These are students starting new careers in fields where they may end up working with people who have deep-seated emotional trauma or special needs. If they go in unprepared or misinformed, they may do more harm than good.
A basic management or Excel course doesn't carry much risk if it's poorly designed. The same isn't true for subjects rooted in social sciences or therapeutic work. Many of the reviews about accuracy issues or confusing language come from students who enrolled in these therapy-adjacent modules.
Another concern is how the platform markets some of these programs as complete training that prepares students to practice in these fields. Can a few hours of info dump narrated by a computer-generated voice realistically equip someone to work with clients?
With AI becoming part of everyday life and language models getting better fast, it's even harder to justify paying for outdated, surface-level lessons that just recite information.
Current AI tools can already explain concepts more clearly, adapt to your learning style, and answer follow-up questions in real time. If a course can't offer more depth, human guidance, or practical experience than what AI now provides for free (and more engagingly), it's hard to see the value.
New Skills Academy courses in the media
According to a feature published in Schools Week, New Skills Academy has previously used misleading advertising about its classes. It positioned a 15-hour course as training equivalent to an undergraduate degree, and suggested it was a requirement to start a career as a special educational needs teacher.
The piece also investigated the accuracy of the content and the language used in these online courses.
Sara Alston, a special educational needs and disability (SEND) expert with 30 years of experience, reviewed the teaching-assistant courses on the platform. She said they were "written in a way that makes no sense at all and feels deliberately written to make it sound academic," echoing the disappointed reviews on Trustpilot.
Alston also pointed out that the description of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) was inaccurate in these courses. The content had out-of-date details and referred to people with learning difficulties using inappropriate terms such as "emotional disturbance."
On top of content accuracy, the piece raised ethical concerns. Some courses on New Skills Academy are accredited by an independent appraisal service called IVCAS. However, as the article pointed out, this organization is owned by the same person as the online academy, creating a clear conflict of interest.
Who should (and shouldn't) take these courses
So, is New Skills Academy worth it? That depends entirely on what you want out of it. Let's break it down honestly.
Who New Skills Academy is a good fit for
You're curious and exploring. You've been wondering if life coaching, mindfulness, or spiritual coaching might be for you, and you want a low-risk way to find out before committing to a £2,000+ certification program. A £100 taster course is a reasonable way to test the waters.
You need CPD hours for your day job. You already work in a UK profession that requires CPD logging (teaching, nursing, HR, social work) and you want a cheap, convenient way to bank structured-learning hours on a relevant topic.
You want to add a small extra to your current practice. Maybe you're already a trained therapist, yoga teacher, or healthcare worker, and you want to skim the basics of coaching, mindfulness, or CBT as a side interest. You have the clinical judgment to filter what's useful.
You're a hobbyist or personal-development junkie. You love learning new things, you're not trying to charge clients, and a certificate on the wall just makes the commitment feel official.
Who should look elsewhere
You want to become a paid coach. If your plan is to build a real practice and charge clients real money, a 13-hour course narrated by an AI voice isn't the foundation you need. Look at ICF-accredited programs instead.
You want to work in corporate or executive coaching. Large organizations and coaching platforms almost always require ICF credentials. A New Skills Academy certificate won't get you past the vetting stage.
You want to work with vulnerable clients. Coaching anyone with trauma, neurodivergence, mental health challenges, or special educational needs needs real training, ideally from an expert-led program with live practice and supervision. The Trustpilot reviews and Schools Week reporting on accuracy issues should be a red flag here.
You want live practice and mentorship. No coach learns their craft just by watching videos. If you want real feedback on your coaching, real peer practice, and real mentor coaching hours, you need a program built around live instruction.
You could learn the same from a free YouTube playlist. A recurring Trustpilot complaint is that the material is surface-level information you could Google. If you're self-motivated and willing to spend a few weeks on free resources, you might already have everything New Skills Academy sells.
New Skills Academy: is it legit?
New Skills Academy has gained quick popularity for its short online courses, but it's also taken plenty of criticism from students and the media.
The curated testimonials on the site paint a positive picture: structured lectures, beginner-friendly content, and business modules.
Independent reviews on sites like Trustpilot tell a different story. Many reviewers say the content is superficial, inaccurate, and easily replaced with a quick online search.
A lot of the concerns relate to courses about working with people (ADHD, special educational needs, reflexology) where experts reported inappropriate language and factual inaccuracies.
The coaching-related courses on New Skills Academy may give you an introduction to fundamental coaching concepts, but they aren't equivalent to hands-on, expert-taught training from a full coaching certification program.
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FAQ
Is New Skills Academy legit?
Yes. New Skills Academy is a real, CPD-accredited e-learning platform that has enrolled over a million students and delivers the courses you pay for. However, several independent reviewers and experts have flagged accuracy, language, and presentation issues in their quick video lectures, so "legit business" doesn't automatically mean "high-quality training." Treat the certificates as a taster or personal enrichment rather than a professional coaching qualification.
Is New Skills Academy accredited?
New Skills Academy courses are accredited by the CPD Certification Service, a general continuing-development accreditation body in the UK. Some courses are also accredited by IVCAS, an in-house body owned by the same person as New Skills Academy. They are not accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), so you can't use the certificate to apply for an ICF credential.
Are New Skills Academy diplomas recognized?
New Skills Academy "diplomas" are CPD-accredited certificates of completion, not regulated academic diplomas. They're recognized for personal development, CV enrichment, and logging UK CPD hours, but they don't carry the same weight as a university diploma, an Ofqual-regulated qualification, or an ICF-accredited coach training program. Whether they're useful depends entirely on who's reading your CV.
Is New Skills Academy recognized in the UK?
New Skills Academy is a UK-based company and its certificates are CPD-accredited through the CPD Certification Service, so they're recognized for informal learning and CPD hours in the UK. They are not Ofqual-regulated qualifications, and they don't replace formal UK vocational credentials like NVQs, BTECs, or degree-level study. For coaching specifically, UK employers and corporate clients usually look for ICF, EMCC, or AC accreditation rather than a CPD certificate.
Is New Skills Academy worth it?
It depends on what you want. For a cheap, casual introduction to a topic (a curious hobbyist, someone logging CPD hours, a professional exploring a new direction) it can be worth the £100. For someone planning to build a paid coaching business or work with vulnerable clients, the answer is no. You'll need a proper ICF-accredited program with live instruction and mentor coaching hours.
Do you get a certificate from New Skills Academy?
Yes. Every completed course comes with a digital certificate, and you can order a printed version for an extra fee.
How do I cancel New Skills Academy?
You can cancel your membership by logging into your account and turning off auto-renewal under "My Subscriptions," or by contacting their customer support team directly.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in May 2024 and has since been updated for accuracy.
