This guide outlines the strategies and study tips to ensure your career education is successful no matter what stage you are at.
It pays to become a better student regardless of your current stage of your career education. You will never accomplish true self-improvement without becoming a better professional.
Education is not just about the time you spend in college or university trying to get a degree. It continues throughout your career. Formal education is a start, of course, but it simply provides the foundation for the rest of the learning you will have in life.
It provides the framework for teaching you how to learn. But it does little good if you do not apply those lessons and study tips to a regimen of continued learning — and never stop learning.
For example, doctors and nurses are as much students as they are healthcare professionals. There are always new medications, diagnostic tools, and surgical procedures. You don’t want a doctor who started their practice 30 years ago but failed to keep learning.
To exaggerate the example, imagine seeing a doctor who time-traveled from the fifteen hundred. No matter how good of a doctor they were at the time, you would not trust them with your healthcare today. The same applies to business professionals, engineers, architects — in fact, every field. Things change.
The idea that we live in the “knowledge society” makes many people go back to further their education, taking courses to complement their initial training, seeking a new area of knowledge or professionalization.
This can be noticed in the growing number of people who enter higher education institutions to do a new degree, especially in evening courses. There are faculties today that only work at night, because that is when the demand of students is and, as a rule, they are students over 30 years old.
Career education study tips
The way you can change with the times is by keeping your education up to date, particularly if you are considering a change of career. If your learning chops are a bit rusty, try the following study tips:
Study tips 1: Use Practice Tools
When was the last time you took an academic test? If you have 20 years separating you from your last official exam, your study skills are going to be a bit rusty. Whether you are going to be a full-time student at Columbia University, or a part-time student at a no-name community college, you can take advantage of the best test practice tools available. It is a little like hiring a tutor, but without the tutor.
The biggest mistake you could make is to overestimate your academic abilities based on your former experience of being a student. Your brain was very different than it is right now.
Your brain was not fully developed until about age 25. It had a high degree of elasticity when you were last in school. That is more conducive for learning.
Your brain is much less elastic today. That will make it more difficult to learn new things. That doesn’t mean you can’t. It just means you should be careful to avoid a false sense of your capabilities. And don’t let early challenges discourage you.
Study tips 2: Make the Time
You really do have time. You have to stop sabotaging your efforts by telling yourself that you just don’t have time for education. You have to make time for the things that are truly important.
Making time is not always easy. But it is always necessary. It is usually a matter of priorities. We have to be honest about our real priorities. Our real priorities are not the things we want to do, but the things we actually do.
If you knew for a fact that there was a billion dollars being held for you by an attorney in Norway and all you had to do was make the time to go get it, you would not even think about how much time it would take. You would already be out the door.
None of us have time for things that are not true priorities. When advancing your education becomes a true priority, you will be surprised at how much time you really had for it all along.
Study tips 3: Be True to Yourself
You will never become a great student by following anyone else’s prescription for being a great student. You have to be true to yourself and the kind of learner you are. Some teachers force students to take notes with pencil and paper because they are convinced that is the best way to learn.
But many students are just distracted when they try to take notes and miss more of the instruction than if they just paid attention. Some study best in a quiet environment while some need death metal rattling their brain. Whether it is focus or distraction, do whatever it takes to be at your best.
Conclusion
A higher degree can substantially increase a professional’s employability and salary. In the case of the population, many postponed the higher qualification project because they faced difficulties when they were younger. An example of this is fathers and mothers who enter college after their children grow up, since the life situation is more balanced.
There are still those who go to college after the age of 30 to fulfill an old dream, which can mean the first higher education degree or a second college. These students are usually very committed to the course and value the opportunity to finally go to the college of their dreams.
The variety of options, the recognition of these courses and the increase in the acceptance by the labor market of the diplomas obtained through distance learning are some of the reasons cited by the researcher for the increase in student demand for this modality, especially mature students of more than 30 years old.
You are a student of life if not academics. Be a better one by utilizing study tips and tools, making the time, and being true to whatever it is that makes you the best version of yourself for your career.
