21 years into tech, an Aussie engineer finally earns a CS degree — online, after hours

A software engineer and ML practitioner with roughly 21 years of experience and no formal qualifications describes finishing a University of London Bachelor’s in Computer Science, delivered entirely through Coursera and marked by Goldsmiths. He started on impulse in September 2022 and completed it in about three years and nine months, studying nights and weekends while working full-time. Having entered the industry as a teenager via certifications like A+ and MCSA, he’d never found the missing degree to be a career obstacle in Australia, where he says experience and self-education tend to count more than credentials — but the lack of one had once cost him a US role, since the E-3 visa requires a bachelor’s.

The program uses performance-based admission for applicants without a high school diploma: pass two intro modules and you’re in, with those grades counting toward the final result. Students pay per module (about £823 each for him, roughly £17,000 total, and tax-deductible as work-related self-education in his case) and can compress the degree to as little as three years by taking four modules per session. He trimmed his own path by swapping three modules for Coursera-based Recognition of Prior Learning certificates — Google IT Support, IBM Data Science, and IBM AI Engineering — which collectively saved a full session.

He’s blunt that remote doesn’t mean easy: assignments are long, exams are hard, and the workload spiked sharply in later modules, at one point pushing him to sit 4am proctored exams before a full workday. He also notes a telling detail about how the field is shifting — exams were briefly open-book and unproctored in 2022, but the rise of capable LLMs pushed the university to adopt Inspera proctoring software.