Yahoo Finance This career shortcut takes you straight to a high-paying job
University degrees can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take years to complete. But what if you’ve chosen the wrong one?
If you’ve found yourself studying a degree in a field you no longer want to pursue a career in, there’s one career shortcut that will still take you straight to a high-paying job: e-learning.
E-learning sites like LinkedIn Learning and Skillshare offer users unaccredited courses on particular skills like photoshop and coding, and they’re being used to get a leg up when it comes to the workforce.
“We have about 8,000 teachers all over the world who are day-to-day experts in a wide range of creative topics,” Skillshare CEO Matt Cooper told Yahoo Finance.
“We have about 26,000 classes – they’re all video based and they’re typically 45 minutes to an hour long.”
Every class the user takes has a project attached to it, Cooper said.
“The best way to learn is to actually put it to work, so once you take a class, you can upload it and get feedback from your teacher and other students.”
While Skillshare is for creatives, other sites like LinkedIn Learning offer courses in Excel, software programs and data science.
How can I leverage e-learning to grow my career?
Around 72 per cent of recruiters use online courses to differentiate candidates at junior and mid-management levels, a recent survey revealed.
What’s more, 73 per cent of recruiters find online courses valuable when trying to determine whether you’re worth a promotion.
When law graduate Siobhan Pyburn realised she wasn’t keen on pursuing a career in the legal field, she looked on job sites to see the current skills that were in demand.
One of them was a program on computer-aided design, which, if she could master, would see her paid up to $82 per hour.
“I realised that if I could learn this very specific skill, I could command a decent salary fairly easily,” Pyburn wrote in a blog post for The Financial Diet.
And so she set herself a target of mastering the program, 2D Microstation, in two weeks, using just online tutorials on YouTube and a DVD series she purchased on Amazon.
“Once I updated my LinkedIn profile, recruiters began to contact me,” she wrote. I was surprised by the level of demand and how quickly things moved.”
Pyburn went on to land jobs worth over $2,800 a week, and continued to use e-learning sites to improve her skillset.
The global e-learning market is expected to grow by US$93.64 billion (AU$140 billion) between now and 2024, propelled by an increase in the adoption of microlearning, new reports show.
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