Learning to Enhance Your Career

Learning to Enhance Your Career

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Most Psychology Today readers have at least one degree and if they want more education, it's usually to enhance their career. This article proceeds with those assumptions.

Sometimes, going back to a college or a  university is necessary. For example, you can’t be a psychotherapist without at least a master's. And in some fields, even if a degree isn't required, employers tend to hire holders of an advanced degree.

But more often than you might think, you can learn more, especially more of practical value, far faster and less expensively using one or more of the following: self-study, tutoring, online forums, one-shot classes, courses, and conferences.

Of course, if you’re pursuing education to impress employers, you’ll need to make the case that you’ll be at least as good an employee for having attended “You U” than State U. Later in this article, I’ll show you how to do that, indeed that you’re a better candidate.

If you decide you do need a degree, at the end of this article, I’ll discuss how to maximize your chances of admission to that small percentage of schools that actually are highly selective. If you want to learn formal letter then you can learn by clicking on 👉 formal letter

Self-study

If you’re motivated, self-study offers the advantage of control of what you learn, its pace, and when you learn. Plus, it’s free.

Most people study most effectively in short stints, perhaps 20 minutes on, five off. In any case, it's important that you learn actively. For example, paraphrasing the few paragraphs you just read, do a problem using the just-studied material, etc. Otherwise, you risk remembering too little.

Self-study is often enhanced if you ask a coworker or tutor to help you with stumbling blocks. When working with a tutor, it's usually wise to have the tutor not dictate the focus but mainly address your questions. Tutors, by phone, video or in-person, in a wide range of areas, are available at tutor.com and wyzant.com.

One-shot classes

Even most brilliant instructors soon reach a point of diminishing returns: Give them one hour to present their best ideas and it will be rich. Give them ten hours and your value received per hour likely diminishes rapidly. So it's usually wiser to take ten one-hour classes from ten top-rated instructors than one ten-hour course, let alone a semester-long course.

Given that your aim is career enhancement, you’re best able to well-curated practical courses if they're online courses because the platforms LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Udacity, and Coursera contain tens of thousands of courses, mainly short ones, all with student reviews and usually with syllabi. You’ll have dramatically fewer choices if you limit yourself to local colleges,. In addition, those have the liability of your having to traipse there at a specified time whereas most online courses are asynchronous.

Online forums

These attract engaged professionals, often quite expert, typically answering questions or posting recent work products. So, lurking and asking questions can be valuable. After a while, if you feel confident, you might share your ideas, perhaps asking for feedback.

Conferences

Professional conventions and trade shows enable you to choose from many short, classes, often presenting more up-to-date material than in university courses. Especially consider pre-conference workshops: half- to one-day long small-group classes on topics of broad interest taught by the field's top instructors. Conferences are worthwhile also in that exhibitors show the latest materials and equipment and their representatives are often senior people you’d otherwise never get to talk with. So you might forgo some sessions in favor of the exhibit area. That’s because, with most people in sessions, you’ll get more time then to talk with the exhibitors. A final plus of conferences is that they’re filled with people committed to their field. Chatting with them is a way to learn on-one-one while establishing relationships.

Full courses 

Of course, there is an advantage to the full-length course: a large corpus of material is organized for The aforementioned platforms offer many full-length courses at the above platforms. Of course, local institutions do as well. Don't ignore community colleges. Many bachelor's degree holders return to the community for practical learning, often at a minimal cost. And community college instructors are hired and promoted mainly on their teaching ability so the quality may, surprisingly, be better than at prestigious, research-centric universities.

Convincing an employer to hire you over candidates with a higher degree

You can make a persuasive case. For example,

Many people got degrees at great cost in time and money yet found much of the learning was theoretical and the main benefit was the piece of paper. So I have chosen the road less traveled: I have forgone State U in favor of You U, a curated set of short, practical classes, self-study, tutoring, and conferences. (See attached. which lists all I've done plus key learnings.) I’m hoping that rather than eliminate me for the lack of a degree, you might appreciate the practicality of my You U education and that I was enough of a self-starter to see it through.

Colleges and universities

What if you do want a degree or at least a certificate? Employers like them and you like the idea that a long program is structured for you, as well as having fellow students to be with for a year or seven, as alas is too often the case with the Ph.D.

Perhaps surprising, most universities, even those that seem highly selective, maybe less so than you might think. Sure, their average GRE may be high but that doesn’t mean that near the bottom of the class, the institution doesn't admit some pretty lackluster folks, especially if they’ll pay full-freight.

That said, a dozen or two of the nation’s 3,000+ colleges, are tough to get into, notably Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Berkeley, Oxford, and Cambridge. The education there, ironically, tends to emphasize the theoretical over the practical but the designer-label diploma signals intelligence so some education-seekers are willing to make the trade-off. If that’s you, here are a few lesser-known admission tips that are particularly relevant to getting into graduate school:

• Look for a distinctive program within each university that appeals to you. Then, in your application essay make the case for why that’s a good fit for you. Universities like to admit students who are particularly well-suited to their offerings.
• See if there’s a professor who specializes in something you’re interested in. Read an article by him or her. Then write or speak to the professor during an office hour. Explain that you’re interested in their specialty, indeed have read one of their articles, and are wondering if s/he’d tell you a bit about the program and his or her work. At the end of the conversation, if you like the professor and the program, ask if, if you're admitted, s/he might consider your being an advisee and/or research assistant. Professors, especially at research-centric universities, value acolytes willing to help with their research. A letter of recommendation from one of the institution’s professors can get you into an institution that otherwise would have rejected you.
• If local, ask an on-target professor if you might audit a course. That gives you a chance to see if you really do want to go to graduate school, and also to strut your stuff and build a relationship with the instructor.

Lifelong learning is usually important. Perhaps this article's ideas will enhance yours.