Will a home study course really help my career?

If you’ve never dabbled in the world of home study before, you could be forgiven for doubting just how useful a home study course could be to your career prospects. You may think nothing can replace the intense learning you receive from a classroom course, particularly something you might take at higher education.

However, there is one thing that a home study course requires from the student, over and above anything found in a student of higher education, and that’s self-motivation.

I’ll elaborate: as someone who has interviewed a great many candidates for different roles, the majority of them being university graduates, I know that not all graduates are equal. I don’t mean in ability either; obviously everyone has different skills, strengths and weaknesses. No, I mean in aptitude and drive. Many of the candidates I have interviewed over the years may well have qualifications in the relevant fields, but do they actually have an interest in it? Have they looked outside their, often very narrow, field of study to learn more about the area they claim to be interested in?

Typically, the answer is ‘no’. Many graduates, even people with first class honours degrees, have studied what they have been asked to study for their degree course and nothing else. They haven’t shown a genuine interest in the subject or field by exploring other areas, and have often only taken the degree in the first instance because they’ve followed a natural progression from their school days.

Let’s look at web designers for example. The web design field changes all the time, with new technologies, new coding languages, new browsers and new devices always being released, often reshaping the landscape of what is possible with web design. If a graduate who claims to have an interest in web design doesn’t follow these changes and only completes the coursework they have been asked to do, how can they truly claim to have an interest in the field?

The best candidate I have ever interviewed, interestingly enough, did not even have a degree. He was self-taught, from home, using online courses and resources. He didn’t go to university to be spoon-fed web design ideas that were already several years out of date. He looked for his own inspiration, conducted his own research, experimented with his own work and showed a level of motivation lacking in most graduates.

That is what recruiters are looking for: people who can do it for themselves, rather than people who are institutionalised by universities and colleges and need to be told what to learn.

This is why home study courses are so great for cultivating the right work ethic, and doing a course off your own bat because you ‘want’ to learn, rather than because you ‘have’ to learn for your degree or college diploma, shows a level of commitment missing from most people in the job market.

Here at Online Learning Academy, we’re so certain of the value of home study to improving your career prospects that we’re giving away a course in mindfulness. This short course teaches you revision techniques to help your learning, whether that’s through home study or classroom education. We know you’ll like the course, so download it here for free.