Educational Opportunities to Help Progress Your Career
As you get older, new opportunities emerge to educate yourself in order to build a set of skills and a library of knowledge that you can apply to any job you’re interested in taking. From school all the way through to adult learning classes and mentorships, you should always be looking to build a firm and robust base of education to help support your career aspirations. In this article, you’ll learn about all of the educational opportunities available to you – and how you can make the most of them throughout your long and prosperous career.
Education After High School
Many individuals choose to head to college or university as soon as they’re finished with school. For those with lofty academic aspirations, this is often seen as the natural route. Nonetheless, a growing proportion of individuals choose to first enter industry, to get work experience and to earn cash to support their studies, before making the leap into an undergraduate degree. The choice here is yours – what’s certain is that a degree from a reputable university – with places offered only to the best school students – can go a long way in your own career progression.
When you do choose to study at college or university, you need to ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment. This means working hard as your play hard with other young adults who are ambitious to succeed in their future careers. Make sure that you do all the reading that you’re assigned, and that you form strong bonds or support with your peers and your tutors. You’re looking to emerge with a strong degree grade in order to be accepted into competitive jobs in the future.
Postgraduate Education
The journey within educational institutions doesn’t necessarily end when you’re presented with your undergraduate degree upon your graduation. For many students, this is a ticket into the new job of their dreams; for others, this is the first stage in a longer educational journey. If you’re interested specifically in the kinds of careers that require a master’s degree or a PhD, you will have to undergo further studies on completion of your undergraduate degree.
For many people across the US, the price of such a long period in education can take its toll. Indeed, studying for between 3 and 7 years can be incredibly expensive, and no amount of part-time work can help you maintain yourself in education. That’s why universities across the world are increasingly offering their courses online – and courses from the UK’s University of Exeter are one example of these excellent new resources. Enabling you to work on your degree from home, while you have a full-time job, these online postgraduate degrees can help you achieve the extra qualifications you need to further impress hiring officials when you come to apply for senior jobs.
Job Training
Once you’ve completed all of your university studies – whatever shape, form or duration that they take – you’ll be out into the big wide world, looking for jobs. While you may feel motivated to take a job in a large corporation with a high wage, you should still be focused on your educational development, and the learning you can extract from each role that you take. It’s in this respect that you may find a lower-paid job, with more opportunities for learning and training, preferable to higher wages in larger companies.
One of the key questions you should ask in an interview is how much training you’ll receive on the job. This should help you understand how much the company you’re interviewing to join will invest in your future and your workplace education. It’s also a great question to ask as it shows you’re motivated and eager to learn, hitting the ground running when you’re hired. Make sure you make the most of on-the-job training – not least because, after so many years of paying for education, you’ll be being paid to learn when you join a company.
Mentors and Tutors
When you begin your career, mentors and tutors are important. These individuals will be senior managers, or colleagues who have been in the job for years, who will be able to show you the ropes. If you build a good rapport with these sources of wisdom and learning, they may well take a shine to you, and help you achieve the career progression that you’re striving for. In the meantime, they’ll support you when you run into troubles with your work and your responsibilities in the workplace.
Finding yourself a mentor should be a priority when you’re starting out in a new job. It’s the wisdom of older and more experienced hands that can really help you understand the intricacies of the job, and keep you humble when it comes to your ambition and your drive to complete your work to the best of your abilities. With the support of senior colleagues, you’ll ensure you’re learning as much as you can on the job.
Supplementary Classes
Meanwhile, though you’ve decided to leave educational institutions behind, there are still shorter-term courses out there that can help you supplement your education. Indeed, these courses are often paid for by the companies you’ll work for – and they’ll ask you to gain qualifications in a range of different fields in order to qualify you for promotions or higher wages. Even without the impetus from your company, you should familiarize yourself with online education courses in order to continually learn while you’re working in your job.
If you pay for these courses – a nominal fee, much of the time – you’ll be sent an official certificate of qualification, which you’ll be able to add to your educational portfolio, and present in future meetings or interviews as proof that you’re qualified to undertake certain tasks. This kind of supplementary education is incredibly important for those who want to manage large groups of people – many of whom perform jobs that you would ordinarily know little about. Getting that basic level of understanding in a wide range of business activity can help you go far in your career.
Industry Workshops
Seminars and workshops, un by companies, or companies, are another useful educational resource for ambitious workers. It’s at these learning centers that you’ll begin to understand how industry knowledge and wisdom is often more important, when you’re on the job, than the qualifications that you achieved at university or college. Meanwhile, the individuals at these seminars and workshops will be able to help you in your career, adding to your growing network of contacts.
You should always keep an eye out for these educational opportunities in your locality, as they will often help you to learn those little extra nuggets of information that can help you achieve the promotions you’ve been working so hard to secure. Make sure you’re ready to learn even the smallest slice of knowledge from your tutors at these courses, and be sure to introduce yourself personally and to ask the tutors questions, in order to get as much as you can out of the experience.
Reading Books
Finally, there can often be no substitute for a good book. Whether you’re reading fiction or non-fiction, the world of the book can often be a portal through which you learn new and unexpected knowledge, which can help you in your career. It’s widely believed that reading improves empathy, for example, because the author asks you to empathize with the characters in their book. Empathy, of course, is a valuable workplace resource – and if you can learn it from books, you’ll be better-liked when you’re at the office.
But there are also specific books to help you in your career. If you take a quick browse of your local bookshop in the coming weeks, you’ll see rows upon rows of self-help books and career progression texts, all of which offer guidance and advice to those ambitious to make strides in their career. There are also industry ‘classics’ – those must-read tomes – to get your hands on, in order to know the inner workings of the business that you’re working within, and to comprehend the history of business development up to the present. Have a book always on the go in order to benefit from this form of education throughout your career.
From school through to tutors and seminars, this complete guide should help you plan out your education alongside your career, in order for you to make great strides in your professional life.