An issue every person must confront in their career is self-determination for success. This is typically measured by success on a professional or personal level; however, these people also consider the personal cost of continuing education necessary to achieve this success. Taking a more practical view, avoiding continuing education is too costly to ignore for achieving career success.
Careers and life, in general, can become quite boring if a person does not engage in learning activities. New knowledge and career skills are essential components necessary for success in both career and lifelong personal learning. Some students prefer to use essay writer services to save time for their career development tasks or internships. Taking time to learn requires an investment in time and a commitment to learning. Why? Because no one is there to push a person to succeed in life, only being proactive leads to success.
Career training: Learning new skills
Completing career training through enrollment in continuing education courses and programs is only one step on the path to career success. Learning new skills stimulates the ability to think critically by exercising the mental processes necessary to learn new information.
These mental processes involve internalizing new information, along with applying new knowledge to:
- prior knowledge and experiences within a career field and lifelong learning endeavors
- requirements which may lead to possible career advancement
- hobbies or things of interest such as traveling, writing, reading, etc.
- achievement of personal or professional learning goals
Learning: Taking time to learn
Taking time to learn requires selecting a specific time during a day, week, or month dedicated to learning. These designated periods must be used to learn new career skills or knowledge about a topic of interest. This time may be costly for life and monetary commitments; however, these obligations are essential.
Considering most people will have multiple careers during their lifetime, avoiding the label of having out-of-date employment skills is an important advantage for continuing education. This problem often occurs to people working at one job for several years and the employer:
- Does not pay for continuing education, resulting in an employee attitude that additional career skills are not necessary – until they begin searching for a new job.
- Relies on outdated methods of manufacturing and advertising, refusing to move into the technological world since everything is just fine for the employer’s bottom line – leads to employee lack of basic technological skills, which are essential today.
- Pays for or contributes to continuing education; however, employees decide life requirements or the need to contribute some of their own money is too costly – leads to out-of-date job skills when seeking promotion or a new career.
Taking time to learn something new every day or self-designated times is not that difficult when career success, for example, as a paper help, is factored into the equation. This can be accomplished by reading professional journals, reading a book, or enrolling in free computer courses for continuing education credits.
Lifelong learning: Tips for career and personal success
Continuing education is a lifelong learning process that people are involved in from the day they are born, regardless if they are aware of it or not. Every time someone says, “I learned something new today,” they are engaged in lifelong learning.
The following are tips for achieving career and personal continuing education goals.
- Find a mentor – seek out someone within the company who is willing to provide professional advice. Then become familiar with this person’s strategies for success and adapt them to meet personal goals.
- Take advantage of constructive criticism – accept this criticism, evaluate it, and apply it to areas that need improvement. Being defensive turns people away who may only want to help.
- Enroll in continuing education – the costs of avoiding further education far outweigh the inconvenience of missing a few non-essential life commitments. Most employers seek employees to promote or hire employees who are up-to-date on the latest trends and issues within their industry.
- Join a professional organization – this continuing education approach provides updated industry trends and processes through discussion forums, admission to limited-access online and offline resources, and career-advancing opportunities available through conference attendance.
- Professional networking – building a professional network is essential and relatively painless today, considering all the advances on the Internet. Professional networking can be accomplished by joining LinkedIn, looking through essay writer websites for vacancies, reading and commenting on industry-related blogs, and setting up Google Reader to provide instant access to the latest information regarding professional and personal interests.
The bottom line is determining whether continuing education is too costly in terms of life or financial commitments may overall be too costly to career success. The advantages of remaining current in career trends and processes far outweigh any minor inconvenience encountered in the process of learning new employment skills.
Photo credit: The feature image has been done by AS-Artmedia.
