Just ten percent of adults in the United Kingdom are pleased and contented with their working life. The vast majority of course won’t do a thing. The fact that you’re reading this surely indicates that you’re considering or may be ready for a change.
It’s advisable to get some help before you start – find someone who knows the industry; an advisor who can get to the bottom of what you’ll like in a job, and then show you the training programs you may be suited to:
* Are you hoping to be involved with others in the workplace? Would that be with a small ‘tightly-knit’ team or with many new people? It could be working by yourself with your own methodology may be your preference?
* What criteria are fundamentally important with regard to the sector of industry you’ll be employed in?
* After re-training, how long a career do you hope for, and will the industry provide you with that possibility?
* Are you worried with regard to the possibility of getting new work, and keeping a job all the way until retirement?
We would strongly recommend that one of your key sectors is the IT industry – it’s common knowledge that it is one of the few growth sectors. It’s not full of geeky individuals lost in their computer screens all day – we know those roles do exist, but the majority of roles are filled with ordinary men and women who earn considerably more than most.
A capable and specialised advisor (as opposed to a salesman) will ask questions and seek to comprehend your abilities and experience. This is useful for calculating your study start-point.
Of course, if you’ve had any relevant qualifications that are related, then you may be able to commence studying further along than someone new to the industry.
Starting with a basic PC skills course first will sometimes be the most effective way to start into your computer programme, depending on your skill level at the moment.
One area often overlooked by those mulling over a new direction is the concept of ‘training segmentation’. This is essentially the breakdown of the materials for drop-shipping to you, which vastly changes the point you end up at.
By and large, you’ll join a programme that takes between and 1 and 3 years and get sent one module each time you pass an exam. While this may sound logical on one level, consider this:
What if for some reason you don’t get to the end of every exam? And what if the order provided doesn’t meet your requirements? Because of nothing that’s your fault, you mightn’t complete everything fast enough and not receive all the modules you’ve paid for.
Ideally, you’d get ALL the training materials right at the beginning – so you’ll have them all to come back to in the future – whenever it suits you. You can also vary the order in which you complete each objective as and when something more intuitive seems right for you.
Starting from the viewpoint that it’s good to choose the job we want to do first, before we’re able to consider what educational program would meet that requirement, how do we decide on the right path?
As in the absence of any commercial skills in IT, how can most of us understand what someone in a particular job does?
To attack this, a discussion is necessary, covering a variety of unique issues:
* Your personality type and interests – what working tasks you enjoy or dislike.
* Are you hoping to get certified because of a certain raison d’etre – i.e. are you looking at working based from home (being your own boss?)?
* Is the money you make further up on your wish list than other requirements.
* With many, many ways to train in IT – there’s a need to gain some background information on what differentiates them.
* You have to take in what is different for each individual training area.
In these situations, it’s obvious that the only real way to seek advice on these issues tends to be through a good talk with an advisor who has years of experience in IT (and chiefly it’s commercial needs and requirements.)
Consider only training programmes that’ll move onto industry acknowledged accreditations. There are way too many small colleges proposing ‘in-house’ certificates which aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on when you start your job-search.
From a commercial standpoint, only the top companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe or CompTIA (to give some examples) will get you short-listed. Nothing else hits the mark.
Copyright Scott Edwards. Go to www.learninglolly.com/Adobe_Dreamweaver_CS4_Training.html or CLICK HERE.
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This post was written by Jason Kendall on March 11, 2010










