Retraining When You're Busy Enough Already
When you are thinking about changing careers, retraining is something that may be necessary in order to develop the necessary skills to succeed in your chosen field. Some skills will come easier than others and moving into any area that involves software development or coding will definitely require lessons and training. Many employers will want to see evidence of relevant accreditations and qualifications before offering you a job.
The challenge then, is how to manage to retrain and reskill when you are already working in a full-time job and have other life commitments such as children and family to manage. This sounds like a herculean task but it is entirely possible these days thanks to the wonders of remote work and study options. Gone are the days when you could only gain a qualification in a new subject if you attended college classes in the evening, though this is still a viable option for many.
Options for Retraining Around Full-Time Work
There are a few different ways that you can retrain and acquire the skills that you need for your desired career while you are having to work a 9-5 full-time job. We will look at each of these in turn in a little more detail.
Night Classes at a Local Further Education College
These can be an excellent option for gaining some basic qualifications in a new skill and they can be one or two evenings per week, so you aren’t using up all of your family time on them. They can even sometimes be a little later in the evening around 7pm until 8pm or 9pm to allow for people who have a commute from their work to negotiate first.
Most further education colleges have everything from access courses all the way up to Level 4 or Level 5 qualifications, which can be used to go on to an undergraduate degree course at university afterward, if desired. It is unlikely for most career changers that they will need to gain a university-level qualification in order to find employment in their new field but they can discuss their requirements with their local college’s admissions team, who will be well-placed to advise on the subject.
Remote Study Courses Online
There have been remote courses online on many different subjects since the advent of the internet, with varying qualities and no standard level of accreditation across the board. Nowadays, since the global Covid-19 pandemic, there seem to be more focused efforts in bringing together different organisations to help to bring value to accreditations earned online.
If you aren’t looking for a qualification or accreditation but just want to have a taster or explainer about a particular subject area then YouTube has a surprising amount of free content on most subjects.
Some people look down on the content that is available on YouTube because it is free but the creators who use YouTube are earning money from the number of views their videos receive, so it is in their interests to produce high-quality and riveting courses that will keep people coming back and consuming their content. The advertising revenue that gives the course creators their living is no different to if you were paying up front for a course on the likes of Udemy or some other platform, it is just that the content is delivered free to the end-user.
One of the best resources on the internet for online courses is LinkedIn Learning, which is part of the LinkedIn social network that focuses on employment. Unlike their social network, LinkedIn Learning is a paid for service, which you can try for free for a month. They have courses on practically everything imaginable and this is not surprising as they took over popular training provider Lynda.com a few years ago and have incorporated all of their legacy content, as well as commissioning more since then.
Different people learn in their own way and for some people something like LinkedIn learning, with video courses that you can pass by completing quizzes at the end of each unit may be exactly what is needed to help you to progress. You can gain skill-based “badges” for your LinkedIn profile, to make it stand out to companies that you contact through the platform.
Open University
The third of our recommended options is the Open University or OU. This is an accredited University in the UK, which has always been aimed at doing things remotely, even before the internet. There used to be lectures on various topics screened in the early hours of the morning on the BBC TV channels that could be recorded by VCRs by people who were taking specific courses. This was how these early adopters of remote learning did things back in the day and they haven’t stopped innovating since.
The Open University has a wide variety of courses to choose from and is almost a hybrid between the previous two options mentioned. The OU will have students come to a convenient location a couple of times per year for a weekend, where they can meet their fellow students and lecturers in person, but the rest of the course is delivered online.
It is a proven system that works really well for many people who are already in work and are looking to change careers or who are looking to return to work and upskill after some time away from work while raising a young family.
Many Options for Retraining
There has never been a better time to retrain and to decide to change careers, more people have been doing this than ever before. The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have helped a great many people to make up their minds about the kind of life that they want to live, and being stuck in a job that makes them unhappy and dissatisfied just isn’t on the agenda going forward.
Take the time to explore the options that are open to you in your chosen career area and try some of the free courses first to ensure that this is definitely something that you want to pursue.
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