What Type of Course Is Right For Me?

There’s no better way of helping to drive your career forward than to invest in yourself and take a course to furnish yourself with extra skills and qualifications.

Adding skills and training to your CV can radically change your career prospects and significantly increase your earning capacity? But what type of course is right for you?

What Course Do I Want To Do And What Do I Want Out Of The Course?

You need to ask yourself some important questions when deciding what course is right for you. Questions such as:

• What skills do I want to learn?
• Do I want a course that will help me with my current job or one that will prepare me for another job?
• Do I want to increase my basic skills such as literacy or numeracy, or do I want to study for a professional qualification or degree?
• By doing the course, where will it help take my career?

Answering these questions will help focus your mind on what course is right for you and what you will get out of it.

Classroom Course Or Distance Learning?

Thanks to the internet, you’re now not restricted to courses that are run locally in colleges and other educational establishments. You have a whole world of courses now available to you now including:

• Courses at local colleges and universities
• Coursera – An education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide
• Reed Courses – It features a full course search from a range of learning providers. Reed includes distance learning, online, classroom-based and free courses
• Udacity – An education online platform that includes courses and nanodegrees
• Udemy – A variety of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) from some of the world’s leading educational institutions

Whether you choose a classroom course or online/distance learning is up to you and dependent upon how you like to learn. Learning in the classroom is the traditional way and the same as you will have experienced at school. You will need to attend regular sessions on-time at a particular location. If you’d rather something a little bit more flexible, than an online or distance course may suit. With these, you study when you want and where you want, giving you much more flexibility. They’re perfect if you have other commitments such as family.

Apprenticeships

If you are under the age of 25, you may be eligible to do an apprenticeship. These basically provide on-the-job training whilst at the same time helping you to achieve a qualification. Every apprenticeship is different depending upon the industry you work in but all are very popular and a well known and well respected way of getting a qualification.

The biggest advantage of them is that you ‘earn while you learn’. Although the money you may receive may not be a huge amount, it does mean you’re not having to spend money on course fees which can be prohibitively expensive. The main disadvantage of apprenticeships is that they are generally for younger people and aren’t really open or suitable to applicants over 25.

Whatever type of course you decide on, education is a good thing and even if it may not immediately push your career on, it will enrich your life and you may find that it opens up a whole new host of opportunities you never would have thought of.