How much would you pay to get a job? $10,000? And are their any skill certificates worth getting?

First, see Inside the $10,000 Job Search: Career Coaching, LinkedIn Fees, Résumé Help: The costs of finding work climb as job hunts stretch over months; ‘It’s trying to be louder than anyone else’ by Lindsay Ellis of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"One job hunter hired a "firm [that] provides weekly meetings with a career strategist to evaluate open roles and sources potential jobs from talent recruiters. It also created a personal website"

They help him "tailor his résumé to job descriptions"

[He] "says the price will be worth it if it helps him land a job faster.'

There is an "exploding cottage industry of networking and job-search subscriptions, career-coaching services and artificial-intelligence tools—all capitalizing on job seekers’ frustrations in a stalled hiring market."

[There is a] "growing length of the average job search as companies slow recruiting and leave positions unfilled."

[One guy "spent $17,000 last year for an eight-month coding boot camp and now plans to attend college for cybersecurity."

"Spending money on LinkedIn Premium, where connections can help users find someone on the inside, “has a pretty big ROI”—return on investment, said Edward Voelsing, founder of Rivet Group, a recruiting firm in the Charlotte, N.C., area. Connections are helpful in a stagnant market, where applicants can average 100 applications for every interview, he said."

Then see More Workers Are Getting Job-Skill Certificates. They Often Don’t Pay Off.: Many of thousands of online courses and other credentials employees pursue fall short in delivering, new study finds by Haley Zimmerman of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"most programs deliver few material returns"

"Workers, though, have few tools to assess which of thousands of options are worth their time and money. Employers, too, often struggle with what to value."

"just one in eight nondegree credentials delivered notable pay gains within a year of completion." 

[a] "study compared workers who received a credential with similar workers who didn’t get one—then measured the difference in their pay gains and career movements a year later."

"Even some certificates from elite institutions—and for skills in demand—provided little immediate payoff"

"A Project Management Graduate Certificate from Harvard Extension School, for instance, costs $13,760 and takes an average of 18 months to complete online, according to Harvard’s website. Of workers who earned the certificate, the share that advanced in their field was only slightly higher than for similar workers who didn’t get the certificate—a difference of about 3.7 percentage points" 

[Students] "didn’t see pay improve any more than they otherwise would have."

"Workers who received one of the 2,000 top-performing credentials earned about $5,000 extra a year, on average, within 12 months of completing the programs. Many of the certificates were in nursing, radiology and other medical fields"

"A lot of credentials are being designed based on a loose understanding of what it takes for somebody to get hired in the field" 

Maybe with the economy changing so much (and perhaps partly due to AI), no one can be sure which direction to go in. A skill that sounds promising might turn out not to be in demand in just a few years.