ZDNET’s key takeaways

  • OpenAI Academy offers free AI courses and certifications.
  • I tried its 90-minute agents course and came away impressed.
  • Webcasts and event videos offer more ways to sharpen skills.

According to a set of stats aggregated by website Market Intelligence Tools, 62% of US adults aged 18 to 64 have reported using generative AI, as of May. As far back as last December, a McKinsey study found that 88% of organizations report using AI for at least one business function.

In this world, learning and understanding how to use, teach, and build with AI is now table stakes for anyone looking for, or even holding onto a job.

Also: The best free AI courses and certificates for upskilling in 2026 – and I’ve tried them all

To make the process of growing your skills easier (and not coincidentally, giving you more experience with OpenAI’s offerings), OpenAI has the free OpenAI Academy, where you can take hands-on lessons and earn certifications.

We first mentioned OpenAI Academy last year, when the company announced a LinkedIn-like jobs platform called the OpenAI Jobs Platform. As best as I can tell, so far, that platform is vaporware. I can’t find it online. However, if you want to try to land a gig at OpenAI itself, here’s its open jobs page.

More than certifications

One of the things I really like about OpenAI Academy is that it offers more than just courses with certifications. It also aggregates OpenAI webcasts and conference videos, which you can watch just for fun and personal learning.

I found the section for news organizations particularly interesting for fairly obvious reasons.

Special interest education for news organizations

One session I really liked was a discussion of using ChatGPT for visual storytelling. I have a well-documented love for charts and graphs that borders on the unhealthy, so this session really spoke to me.

A thousand words (or more) about how to make a chart

Not all events are available as live replays, but you can dig into the events page. There, you can look back at previous events and look forward to register for upcoming events.

Taking a course

To test out OpenAI Academy, I enrolled in Agents and Workflows learning path, which took me about 90 minutes to complete.

Courses include video segments

A learning path is a series of training elements, chained together. In the case of Agents and Workflows, the first training element is an interactive course consisting of text, videos, screen shares, self-paced exercises, and exercises where you use ChatGPT and ChatGPT Work to carry out project assignments.

Here’s one of the images presented as part of the training process

These elements are the equivalent of lectures, homework, and lab projects in traditional in-person courses. I have a Masters degree in education learning and technology, so I also always like to evaluate how well courses conform with education best practices. I found this course to be quite solid in terms of both involvement and skills evaluation.

There were a bunch of helpful screen recordings

I also found the visual presentation of concepts, and the breakdown of what best fit agents and what best fit chats, to be quite clear and helpful.

It’s helpful to understand what tool is best for what task

The course didn’t dwell on any topic for too long. It quickly went from defining what agents are (through a variety of workflow decision trees), all the way up to scheduling and organizing workflow projects using agents.

While the course didn’t reach the complexity of something like my recent small business customer support automation project, it did impart enough knowledge to help you feel comfortable starting to use agents and putting them to work.

How to think about instructing an agent

The second part of the learning path was an assessment consisting of 20 questions. The assessment was more challenging than I expected.

I was so engrossed in making sure I answered the mix-and-match, multiple-choice, pick-one, and other question types correctly that I forgot to take screenshot of examples. That’s the sign of a good test. I feel that OpenAI applied good education theory to its practical assessment.

Learning and testing help you retain knowledge

It was enough of a mental workout to keep my full attention. I wasn’t able to phone in the answers. Frankly, it was a lot of fun.

Final thoughts

There’s a lot of value in OpenAI Academy. I was disappointed there was nothing on OpenAI Dots, which I’m currently evaluating for a future article. But AI is moving so fast that products and services come out faster than educational materials can be created.

Still, especially if you have a paid ChatGPT account, don’t hesitate to head over to OpenAI Academy. If you have a few hours, you’re almost guaranteed to be able to learn how to get a lot more value from your account, understand more about AI, and move your career credibility forward another notch.

I’ll certainly go back, dig around, watch more videos, and take more courses. I love this stuff.

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David Gewirtz

Senior Contributing Editor
Computer science professor turned AI innovator David Gewirtz has spent over thirty years driving advancements at the forefront of artificial intelligence and is the recipient of the Sigma Xi Research Award in Engineering. He wrote a pioneering analysis that helped shape the early conversation around AI ethics. He was also a pioneer in the commercializing of AI products, including AI languages and knowledge-based systems. He is the designer of the Al Editor, an experimental artificial intelligence engine for parsing, classifying, and identifying news stories. David is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He currently serves on the Artificial Intelligence Threat and Mitigation Cross-Sector Council (AI CSC) for InfraGard, a partnership between the FBI and industry leaders for the protection of U.S. Critical Infrastructure. He is the author of Where Have All the Emails Gone?, as well as How To Save Jobs and The Flexible Enterprise. See full bio