Courses FAQs

Chronologically! No maps or special skills required.

Work through the lessons one by one, selecting ‘Next lesson’ at the top or bottom of the page when you’re done. (Select ‘Previous lesson’ to move back, or navigate to another part of the course using the outline tab on the course homepage.)

Every time you select ‘Next lesson’, we’ll record that lesson as complete. When you’ve navigated through all the lessons, your progress bar on the homepage will reach 100% and you’ll be able to download your course certificate.

You’ll find time estimates on the course homepage and on individual lessons. Lots of our courses have a time range at the top of the homepage, for example 4h 35m - 6h. This shows:

Estimated time to complete core lessons – Estimated time to complete core and optional lessons

We recommend allowing one week for each of the sections and factoring in a mid-point ‘reading week’ so you can catch up and consolidate what you’ve learned. But if you want to take the whole course in a day, feel free!

Everyone studies at their own pace, so don’t worry if you work through the content differently.

Absolutely. The course is online and self-paced so you can work through it however you like.

Unless you plan to do the whole course at once, we recommend scheduling a recurring study slot at a time when you tend to be less busy. That way, the time is protected in your calendar and you’ll get automated reminders to nudge you along.

That’s up to you.

We can send automated email reminders to help you work through the course. You’ll get:

1. A welcome email to mark the start of your course.

2. One email per week to remind you to complete the relevant section.

3. One conclusion email and a final reminder to complete the course.

Many people find these nudges helpful, but you can opt out of emails and set your own pace if you prefer. (You’ll find the opt-out link in your registration email.)

The Course Assistant is an AI tool designed to support you as you take the course.

Think of it as a patient tutor who’s available 24/7 to answer your questions and help you recap important points. The Assistant is trained on the course content as well as a curated selection of extra resources.

We hope you find the Course Assistant useful, but (as with all generative AI tools) it’s good to get into the habit of regularly checking answers for accuracy — just to make sure nothing slips through the net.

It’s easy: work through the lessons one by one, selecting ‘Mark as complete’ at the bottom of each page when you’re ready to move on. You need to work through every section.

When you’ve marked all the essential lessons as complete, your progress bar will change to 100% and you'll be able to download your course certificate from the course homepage.

You’ll see that quizzes, discussions and even some article-based lessons lessons don’t have a ‘Mark as complete’ icon at the bottom of the page. That’s because they’re optional lessons and skipping them won’t affect course completion. But we recommend taking every lesson if you can, because the more fully you engage with the course, the more you’ll get from the experience. You can also bookmark the optional lessons and return to them later.

Nope! You can breathe easy on that front.

Unless we say otherwise, our courses don’t include compulsory assessments that you have to complete to pass.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t tools for testing yourself and applying your knowledge — we provide activities and short quizzes that will help you get maximum impact from this experience. But we trust you to manage your learning and we want our courses to be enjoyable, not a source of stress. So there’s no need to sweat about your quiz results, or to send us any completed activities.

You do indeed.

Once you’ve marked all the essential lessons as complete, you’ll get an email inviting you to download a certificate. You can also download your certificate from the course homepage.

This personalised certificate of completion recognises your hard work and allows you to share your achievement on LinkedIn, with your manager or with colleagues. In addition to highlighting your achievement, telling others what you’ve done might inspire them to continue their own learning.

Great question.

We’re all about impact, so we pack our courses with practical elements to help you spread and act on the knowledge you gain.

We provide a host of resources, from downloadable summaries and interview guides, customisable slide decks and discussion prompts, to frameworks and checklists.

And every course includes activities and reflection exercises to help you apply the lessons from each section. We include public servants’ experiences of practical application in their contexts, and we invite learners to share their own tips and insights through discussion lessons. It can be tempting to skim through activities when you’re busy and tired, but engaging with them will multiply the impact of your learning efforts.

Many of our courses come with a handbook or Impact Plan, which contains links to all the practical resources, plus spaces to complete the course activities.

Please do! As a social learning platform, we love it when learners engage with the Apolitical community. Exchanging ideas within and across departments benefits everyone — especially when it comes to global, sector-spanning issues like the ones we cover in our courses.

At intervals throughout your course, you’ll find private discussion pages where you can discuss the ideas we cover and hear other learners’ perspectives. But don’t feel you have to stick to our questions — we’d be delighted if you wanted to start your own discussions.

How? Check out the Apolitical Communities of Practice, which span topics from net zero to neurodiversity. We created these as spaces for connection, collaboration and crowdsourcing of ideas between public servants around the world. Join as many as you like and get chatting!

Feel free. We fill our courses with as many downloadable toolkits, graphics, checklists, discussion outlines and other useful resources as we can. If your course has a Handbook or Impact Plan, this document will include the key takeaways and resources from every section. You’re welcome to share any of these highlights with your colleagues.

Unfortunately, you can’t download the full course. But anyone with an Apolitical account can join our free courses, so if you think your colleagues would benefit from taking a course, simply send them the URL for the course homepage and encourage them to register. If you want to point them to one of our premium courses, speak to your manager or L&D lead about whether there are seats available for your colleagues.

You’ll get more from the course if you have clear learning goals, so it’s worth taking time to consider what you want to learn. Keep these goals in mind as you work through the sections and reflect at the end.

To further boost your impact, write yourself some SMART goals (goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound). Download our SMART goal-setting template and set up calendar reminders to help you track your progress against each goal. These precise, actionable targets provide a great foundation for progression conversations with your manager.

We’ve designed all our courses with busy public servants in mind. That said, we know that when you’re juggling priorities it can be hard to carve out even tiny windows for learning.

Make learning a regular part of your week by:

• Talking to your manager:

  Publicly committing to a goal makes you more likely to follow through with it, so tell your manager that you’re doing this course and make it a recurring talking point in your catch-ups. This makes your learning efforts visible, and discussing your thoughts will also help you retain and apply what you learn. You could also post on LinkedIn or in a team channel to share that you've started the course.

• Learning with colleagues:

  Learning’s often easier in a group. Get a few colleagues to enrol with you and make plans to work through the content together, creating a channel to exchange thoughts and perhaps setting up check-in meetings. Working in this way helps you stay motivated, find ways to apply the ideas in your context and benefit from diverse perspectives.

• Finding your optimal study slot:

  Treat professional development like any other important appointment. Block out weekly or monthly focus time in your calendar. Is there a day when you generally have fewer meetings or get fewer urgent requests? Would keeping your study time regular or setting up a regular study slot with colleagues help you commit? We include a customisable calendar invitation in your registration email that you can use to set this up.

Our mission is to help public servants make changes that improve how governments work for people and the planet. Our platform is made for lifelong learners.

Why not check out:

• Our growing portfolio of free and premium courses on a wide range of important topics;

• Our busy programme of events, where you can learn alongside others and hear from expert speakers;

• Our huge collection of articles written by public servants like you (or you could write your own to share thoughts with colleagues around the world);

• Our Communities of Practice, where you can connect with others and discuss big ideas — and how to make them happen.

You could also talk to your manager or another colleague about how our resources and events fit into your professional development plan and could help you achieve your goals. Start by discovering how to get more from your learning efforts with our free course, How to Learn Effectively in the Public Service.

Each course is produced by a Learning Designer, who researches and writes all the course content, and a Learning Design Manager, who reviews everything according to our design principles and editorial standards. They’re part of a bigger team of experts — from partnerships managers to visual designers and video producers.

We develop many of our courses in close collaboration with subject experts and public servants. We identify partners with significant experience and expertise in the topic area (like the University of Oxford, UN Women and the World Resources Institute) and they work with us to design and review course content. We also speak to public servants throughout the process — and often include their perspectives in courses — to make sure our content addresses real needs and is set to have a meaningful impact.

Select the ‘Contributors’ tab of the course overview page to see the expert partners and public servants who contributed to the development of the course.

We’re committed to making our courses impactful, practical, relevant to public servants and easy to fit into your busy schedule.

Each course takes several months to produce. We do extensive research, thinking carefully about what content to cover and how best to teach it.

Each lesson undergoes multiple rounds of editorial, learning design and subject matter review before being uploaded to the platform. We partner with and have our work reviewed by world-class subject experts, including professors from Oxford and Stanford universities, to ensure that course content is accurate, relevant and up to date.

In addition to collaborating with public servants and industry thought leaders, we use high-quality sources to inform our research.

The sources we’ve used are contained in expandable boxes at the bottom of each lesson and underneath quizzes and videos as relevant. You’ll find corresponding reference numbers within the main text of each lesson.

At Apolitical, we’re excited by the potential of AI. Our mission is to help build 21st century governments that work for people and the planet, and we believe AI can help us — and you — achieve it.

But, as with all new technologies, AI needs strong governance to ensure it’s used responsibly, fairly and sustainably. One of the risks of generative AI (like ChatGPT or Gemini) is that the systems sometimes hallucinate, meaning they can generate content that’s factually incorrect or entirely false.

To counter this, we work closely with experts in the field to ensure that all content we produce is accurate and nuanced. Our learning designers use AI as a tool while they research and write course content, but none of our lessons or courses are generated by AI.

Keen to learn more? Apolitical's AI principles should answer your questions, but do let us know if there’s anything else we should cover.