Well done! Hitting upon this feature suggests you’re thinking about your future, and if it’s re-training you’re considering you’ve already done more than almost everybody else. Did you know that hardly any of us describe ourselves as contented at work - but most will just put up with it. We encourage you to be different and move forward - you have the rest of your life to enjoy it.
Before you make decisions on any career courses, discuss your thoughts with an industry expert who can help you sort out which area will be right for you. Someone who can get to know your personality, and find out what types of work suit you:
* Is having company at work important to you? Are you better with new people or those you know well? Or you may prefer task-orientated work that you can complete alone?
* What thoughts do you have with regard to the industry you’ll work in?
* Would you like this to be the last time you’ll have to retrain?
* Would you like your study to be in an industry where you believe your chances of gainful employment are high until retirement?
Prioritise Information Technology, that’s our best advice - unusually, it’s one of the growing market sectors in this country and overseas. Salaries are also more generous than most.
Finding your first job in the industry is often made easier with a Job Placement Assistance program. At the end of the day it isn’t so complicated as you might think to land a job - as long as you’re correctly trained and certified; the shortage of IT personnel in Britain looks after that.
However, avoid waiting until you have completed your exams before bringing your CV up to date. As soon as you start a course, enter details of your study programme and place it on jobsites!
It’s not unusual to find that you’ll secure your first job whilst you’re still studying (occasionally right at the beginning). If your CV doesn’t show your latest training profile (and it’s not being looked at by employers) then you don’t stand a chance!
Most often, a specialist locally based recruitment consultancy (who will, of course, be keen to place you to receive their commission) is going to give you a better service than a centralised training company’s service. They should, of course, also be familiar with the local area and commercial needs.
A big frustration for a number of training providers is how much people are focused on studying to get top marks in their exams, but how un-prepared they are to work on getting the role they’ve acquired skills for. Get out there and hustle - you might find it’s fun.
A ridiculously large number of organisations only concern themselves with gaining a certificate, and forget what it’s all actually about - which is a commercial career or job. You should always begin with the final destination in mind - don’t get hung-up on the training vehicle.
It’s common, in some situations, to thoroughly enjoy one year of training and then spend 20 miserable years in a job you hate, as a consequence of not performing the correct research when you should’ve - at the outset.
Spend some time thinking about earning potential and what level of ambition fits you. This will influence what precise certifications will be expected and how much effort you’ll have to give in return.
Take guidance from an experienced professional, even if you have to pay - it’s usually much cheaper and safer to find out at the start if you’ve chosen correctly, instead of discovering following two years of study that you aren’t going to enjoy the job you’ve chosen and now need to go back to square one.
In most cases, your normal person has no idea in what direction to head in a computing career, let alone which market they should be considering getting trained in.
As having no previous experience in the IT industry, in what way could we understand what someone in a particular job does?
Consideration of the following issues is most definitely required when you want to reveal the right answers:
* What hobbies you have and enjoy - these can point towards what areas will give you the most reward.
* Are you aiming to achieve a closely held dream - like working for yourself someday?
* What salary and timescale requirements you may have?
* Considering the huge variation that Information Technology encapsulates, it’s a requirement that you can take in how they differ.
* You need to appreciate the differences between each area of training.
The best way to avoid the industry jargon, and discover what’ll really work for you, have an informal meeting with an advisor with years of experience; someone who understands the commercial reality whilst covering all the qualifications.
You have to be sure that all your exams are current and what employers are looking for - you’re wasting your time with programmes which provide certificates that are worthless because they’re ‘in-house’.
From a commercial standpoint, only top businesses such as Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe or CompTIA (as an example) really carry any commercial clout. Nothing else makes the grade.
(C) 2009. Check out LearningLolly.com for logical career advice on IT Jobs News and Comptia News.