Good for you! Hitting upon this feature suggests you’re contemplating your career, and if it’s re-training you’re considering you’ve even now progressed more than the majority of people will. It’s a frightening thought that surprisingly few of us are satisfied and happy at work – but the majority will just put up with it. We implore you to liberate yourself and move forward – you have the rest of your life to enjoy it.
Before you make decisions on individual training courses, seek out someone who can help you sort out which area will be right for you. Someone who can get a feel for your personality, and find out the best career for you to work towards:
* Would you like to work with others? If so, do you want a team or are you hoping to meet new people? Or are you better working in isolation?
* Have you given much thought to which sector you could be employed in? (Post credit crunch, it’s more important than ever to choose carefully.)
* Is it important that this should be the last time you’ll have to retrain?
* Do you think being qualified will give you the opportunity to discover new employment possibilities, and remain in employment until you choose to stop?
Don’t overlook the IT sector, that’s our recommendation – it’s one of the few growth areas throughout Europe. Another benefit is that remuneration packages are much better than most.
Many students come unstuck over a single training area very rarely considered: The method used to ‘segment’ the courseware before being packaged off through the post.
Many companies enrol you into some sort of program spread over 1-3 years, and drop-ship the materials to you piecemeal as you complete each section or exam. If you think this sound logical, then consider this:
How would they react if you didn’t complete everything at the required speed? Often the prescribed exam order doesn’t come as naturally as another different route may.
To provide the maximum security and flexibility, it’s normal for most trainees to make sure that every element of their training is couriered out in one package, all at the beginning. It’s then up to you in what order and how fast or slow you’d like to work.
Looking at the myriad of choice out there, is it any wonder that the majority of newcomers to the industry have no idea which career they will follow.
Working through a list of odd-sounding and meaningless job titles is no use whatsoever. The vast majority of us don’t even know what the neighbours do for a living – so we have no hope of understanding the intricacies of a particular IT career.
Consideration of the following areas is important when you need to expose the right answers:
* The type of personality you have and what you’re interested in – which working tasks you love or hate.
* For what reasons you’re starting in IT – maybe you want to triumph over some personal goal like being self-employed for instance.
* What salary and timescale requirements you may have?
* Considering all that computing covers, it’s a requirement that you can absorb what is different.
* You’ll also need to think hard about the amount of time and effort you’ll put into gaining your certifications.
The bottom line is, the best way of investigating all this is by means of a good talk with an experienced advisor that has enough background to provide solid advice.
A typical blunder that many potential students make is to look for the actual course to take, and take their eye off where they want to get to. Training academies are stacked to the hilt with unaware students who chose a course based on what sounded good – rather than what would get them their end-goal of a job they enjoyed.
It’s possible, in some situations, to obtain tremendous satisfaction from a year of studying and then find yourself trapped for decades in a job you hate, simply because you did it without some decent due-diligence at the beginning.
You’ll want to understand the exact expectations industry will have. What certifications they will want you to have and how you’ll go about getting some commercial experience. It’s also worth spending time setting guidelines as to how far you think you’ll want to build your skill-set as often it can force you to choose a particular set of certifications.
All students are advised to talk with an experienced industry professional before they embark on a retraining programme. This is essential to ensure it contains the commercially required skills for the career path that has been chosen.
Some training providers offer a Job Placement Assistance service, to help you into your first commercial role. But don’t place too much emphasis on it – it’s quite easy for eager sales people to make too much of it. Ultimately, the still growing need for IT personnel in the UK is what will enable you to get a job.
Nevertheless, don’t procrastinate and wait until you’ve qualified before polishing up your CV. As soon as your training commences, mark down what you’re doing and tell people about it!
It can happen that you haven’t even qualified when you’ll secure your initial junior support role; however this isn’t going to happen if interviewers don’t get sight of your CV.
If it’s important to you to find work near your home, then you’ll often find that a specialist independent regional recruitment consultant or service can generally serve you better than a national service, due to the fact that they’re far more likely to be familiar with the jobs that are going locally.
Various students, so it seems, spend evenings and weekends on their training and studies (sometimes for years), only to do nothing special when finding the right position. Sell yourself… Do your best to let employers know about you. Don’t think a job’s just going to jump out in front of you.
(C) 2009 – S. Edwards. Look at How To Choose A Career or CLICK HERE.