New Skills Academy Coaching Courses: Are They Legit?

New skills academy life coach feature

New Skills Academy is a UK-based e-learning site offering hundreds of basic career and life skills courses. It also offers coaching courses in different niches you can complete in a few hours.

In this article, we’ll dissect what these online training programs cover and what students think about them.

What Is New Skills Academy?

New Skills Academy is an online learning platform offering courses across various subjects, from business and finance to health and lifestyle. If you dig deeper, you can find niche courses like dog reiki or oven cleaning.

The platform provides flexible and affordable courses with online certificates focusing on foundational skills and different career paths. They include training videos you can complete in 2-15 hours and some additional written materials.

What Is New Skills Academy?

Though less well-known than giant e-learning sites like Udemy or Coursera, New Skills Academy claims to have received various awards. However, these acknowledgments mainly concerned the online platform’s rapid growth rather than its course quality.

The training programs on New Skills Academy are CPD-accredited and mainly target students and entry-level professionals. The site has enrolled over a million students eager to learn a new skill until today. Its courses cost $110-290; you can get unlimited access to its entire library for $119 a year.

The home page of New Skills Academy claims the platform has been featured in major publications; however, little is reported about the classes themselves. Instead, this piece in The Guardian discusses the impressive transformation story of founder Chris Morgan from gambling addict to entrepreneur. 

New Skills Academy Courses for Life Coaches 

It seems like everyone is starting a life coaching certification today. Many of these programs are available online in a self-paced format for a few hundred dollars, and the training modules on New Skills Academy are no different.

You can buy individual coaching certificate courses for $120 or access their entire library for a year at the same price with their premium membership.

Interestingly, there’s no information about the instructors of these “expertly designed” courses, apart from a few smiley animated faces and first names on their About page.

Tutors

Let’s see what the curriculums of coaching courses cover on New Skills Academy.

Life Coaching Certificate Course

Life Coaching Certificate

The e-learning site offers a foundational life coaching certificate course. It can be completed in 13 hours and costs $120.

If this is the first time you ever learn about coaching, this course summarizes its basic principles and some tools you can use to start working with clients. It introduces the GROW model, the industry’s most commonly taught and used coaching model.

You’ll also learn about questioning skills, ethical standards, and coaching styles. The last two modules will introduce you to finding your first clients and effectively pricing yourself on the market.

Like all programs on New Skills Academy, it’s a self-paced course that you can complete in your own time without any live interaction. You won’t have the opportunity to ask questions about the materials or practice the tools you learn with peers, but the videos will teach you some basic concepts to get started in this field.

Mindfulness Diploma

Mindfulness Diploma

New Skills Academy also offers a Mindfulness Diploma that costs $120 and takes 10 hours to complete. It covers the basic concepts of mindfulness and its benefits for physical and emotional well-being.

You’ll learn about mindfulness meditation, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and their applications. The course also covers how mindfulness impacts emotions, daily life, parenting, leadership, and management skills.

Professional Body Healing Coach Certificate Course

This course is only 3.5 hours long and costs $120. It takes a holistic approach and discusses the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of well-being.

It includes training videos on nutrition, diet, exercise, and natural remedies. Some lectures also discuss meditation, breathing exercises, mindfulness, and stress management techniques. Additionally, you’ll learn about 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 to help them become more resilient to stress. It’s an ambitious undertaking for a 3.5-hour course, but it might give you a taster if you’re interested in health coaching.

Spirituality Coach Certificate

Spirituality Coach Certificate

The spiritual coach course on New Skills Academy takes five hours to complete and costs $120. It focuses on helping people reconnect with their true selves and improving their well-being through spirituality.

It doesn’t follow a particular religion or spiritual system; instead, it teaches different spiritual philosophies and concepts, such as self-acceptance, releasing negativity, connecting with the universe, and the purpose of life. Some lectures also discuss practical tools like meditation, breathing techniques, and topics like the chakra system and karmic ties.

These foundational modules will help you work with clients to help them manage stress, transition through life changes, and feel more fulfilled.

Besides courses tailored to a coaching niche, others focus on a key skill coaches require across specialties. These include:

  • Coaching and mentoring skills
  • Success habits
  • Mindful listening
  • The science of happiness
  • Anxiety awareness

There are also courses related to therapy, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While these classes can help you gain insights into various fields and healing practices, they don’t qualify you to diagnose and treat people with mental and physical health issues.

New skills academy courses

New Skills Academy Reviews

Curated Testimonials

You can find several testimonials curated by the site listed under each course. The ones given by students of the life coaching certificate course highlighted that the lectures were easy to follow and were well-structured.

Kristiana Venturini Review

They appreciated the step-by-step flow of the content that suits beginners and the extra modules that discuss business concepts.

Andreea Boncota Review

Online education is a highly competitive business. New emerging sites in this industry typically gain traction by offering an incentive or encouraging students to write positive reviews. Then, these testimonials can be curated on their site and duplicated on multiple review sites.

So, though the reviews featured on New Skills Academy are impressive, we need to dig deeper to see what independent reviewers say about the platform.

Trustpilot: A Mixed Bag

If you look up New Skills Academy on Trustpilot, you can find thousands of 5-star reviews, many praising the ease of accessing courses and the freedom to learn without any time limit.

Helen Brown Review

Some people also highlighted that the content allowed them to explore new career paths. As mentioned, most people taking these New Skills Academy courses are university students and entry-level professionals.

Karron McWilliams Review

Additionally, a student mentioned that being able to read and watch the modules made it easy for them to follow the content.

Nat S Review

Although less in ratio, there are quite a few disappointed reviews on Trustpilot about New Skills Academy. Several of them mentioned that they expected more from the curriculum based on its promotion and that they could’ve easily found the same information through a Google or YouTube search.

Christine Aylen Review

Beyond the course content, many of the students also criticized the delivery of the lectures. They said the lectures were read in a dull, monotonous voice, which made it hard to stay engaged.

This review also implies that the videos are more of an info dump read by people who aren’t practicing coaching instead of experts with real-life experience.

Roz Review

Some added that tangible tools like healing modalities couldn’t be learned effectively through the platform. It lacked practical explanations, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises for proper application.

ER Review

In addition to content and delivery, more experienced students raised their concerns about the accuracy and language of subjects related to human behavior. Here’s a review from a student taking the ADHD course.

Danielle Sanderson Review

These claims of offensive language and inaccurate facts are especially concerning because the site attracts thousands of entry-level professionals. These professionals are starting new careers in fields where they are expected to work with people with deep-seated emotional issues or special needs. Going into these fields unprepared or misinformed, they may do more harm instead of helping their clients.

While basic management and administrative skills courses likely won’t pose a significant risk when designed inaccurately, the same can’t be said about social sciences and therapeutic subjects. However, most reviews flagging content accuracy and language issues are submitted for therapy-related modules.

In addition, the site often markets these online training programs as comprehensive courses that can prepare students to practice these professions. But are a few hours of binging videos narrated by a computer-generated voice enough to work with clients?

New Skills Academy 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 that it was a requirement to start a career as a special educational needs teacher.

The piece has also investigated the accuracy of the content and language shared in these courses.

Sara Alston, a special educational needs and disability (SEND) expert with 30 years of experience, has reviewed the teacher 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.”

This review echoes some disappointed reviews shared on Trustpilot about various classes on New Skills Academy.

Alston also highlighted that the description of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) was inaccurate in these courses. Additionally, the content had out-of-date details and referred to people with learning difficulties with questionable terms such as “emotional disturbance.”

Besides content accuracy, there were ethical concerns about the content shared on the online platform.

The 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 conflict of interest.

New Skills Academy: Is It Legit?

New Skills Academy has gained attention for its wide range of online courses, but opinions about the platform are divided.

The curated testimonials on their site generally paint a positive picture of the courses, including the ones related to coaching. Students praise them for their well-structured lectures, beginner-friendly content, and additional business modules.

These reviews suggest that New Skills Academy is a great place to gain foundational knowledge and explore new career paths.

However, a deeper look into independent reviews, particularly on Trustpilot, reveals a more complex narrative. While many reviews talk about how easily accessible and digestible the lectures are, others are more critical of the curriculum and its delivery, mainly because it’s superficial and could easily be replaced with a quick online search.

Most issues were raised about courses related to working with people, such as those about ADHD, special educational needs, and reflexology. Some experts reported instances of questionable language and inaccurate facts.

While experts haven’t reviewed the coaching courses, you might need to take them with a grain of salt based on these student and expert reviews. While they can provide a great introduction to the fundamental concepts in coaching, they aren’t equivalent to hands-on, expert-taught training delivered in comprehensive coaching certification programs.

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By Annamaria Nagy
Annamaria Nagy is a Brand Identity Coach and Copywriter. She's been writing for over 10 years about topics like personal development, coaching, and business. She was previously the Head of SEO at the leading transformational education company, Mindvalley.
May 24, 2024

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