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The Flevy Blog covers Business Strategies, Business Theories, & Business Stories.
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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Transformation Strategy (145-slide PowerPoint presentation). Digital Transformation is being embraced by organizations across most industries, as the role of technology shifts from being a business enabler to a business driver. This has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thus, to remain competitive and outcompete in today's fast paced, [read more]
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There used to be lots of romantic tales of people starting at a company’s mailroom and moving up to CEO over a couple of decades, but let’s face it – those days are long gone. It’s important to approach the modern job market with a realistic outlook, as there are still lots of opportunities for development out there, but they often rely more heavily on a person seeking them out on their own. It’s important to have a curious attitude and the willingness to try new things, and as long as you’ve got that down, you should actually find it quite easy to land a job, at least in a starting position.
By far one of the best ways to further your education and career development is to sign up for an online university course. Some people look down on these types of degrees, considering them inferior to regular ones, but that’s far from the case today. The truth is that you can get an education that’s just as good as that from a regular university, if not better, and all it takes is a responsible attitude and knowing what you want to achieve. Many places like https://www.kaplanuniversity.edu can give you a variety of good courses to pick from, and all you have to do is figure out what you want to study.
There are also various opportunities to boost your skills in more specialized and tightly focused areas through shorter online courses, many of which are offered for free (which you can view at https://www.futurelearn.com/). While this won’t make the same impression as a degree on its own, it can still improve your standing against other candidates when you do have a relevant degree, and it can make you look like a much more interesting candidate. People who follow their own educational paths and make use of freely available resources tend to be seen in a much better way by potential employers.
Don’t disregard the benefits of joining an online community related to your course of studies either. Whether it’s a forum, a Slack server, or a Q&A community, you can always benefit a lot from participating in those conversations, answering some people’s questions, and observing current trends. The last bit is actually crucial – a good way to advance your standing in your current career is to make sure that you’re aware of what’s going on in that field at the moment and participating in Internet communities is one of the best ways to go about that.
Combine that with some conventions and meetups and you can develop a very well-rounded profile in whatever career path you pick. Of course, this also assumes that you’ll be responsible enough in following your studies, and that you’ll have an active interest in that degree as well. Not everyone has to be an engineer or physician, so if you’re not immediately attracted to those fields, try to figure out what exactly it is that you want to do, and find out what courses and materials are available for that online.
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