Career Advancement – A Necessity
In talking about career advancement, it is important to note that it is a necessity, not an option. The business world is changing quickly. Thus, one has to either change with it or be left behind. No career is safe. The disruption caused in well-established industries like rentals (Uber, AirBNB), music (iTunes, Spotify), and even shopping (Amazon, Google, etc) are proof that no industry is safe.
The career spent at a single employer is a thing of the past and that means you will interview for more jobs and at more points in your career than your parents and grandparents did. That means more people that you will have to impress. It also means you will have to keep your skills current. A college degree from twenty years ago is not going to impress anyone.
That is the bad news. However, there is good news as well. It is easier to keep your skills up-to-date and train on new skills than it has been in the past. A career is no longer spent with a single company doing a single task. A career is what you make of it. In the past, a company would guide and mold employees through their career. Unfortunately, companies are too busy keeping themselves relevant in the rapidly changing world. Your employer may not exist in a few years. It is up to you to ensure you don’t suffer with them.
How Do I Get There?
That may seem like a bleak picture, but let’s focus on the good news. The Internet has made education cheaper and easier. A customized news feed can bring only the stories you care about into your inbox. This no longer requires a subscription to dozens of newspapers and magazines. It also no longer requires hours of skimming through unrelated and unimportant articles. A few hours a week can keep you up-to-date just like personal assistants used to help executives.
Staying current is one thing, but what about advancing your career? There is good news there as well. Training of all sorts is available on the web and at a cost far cheaper than it was in the past. Bootcamps and online training courses have replaced night classes and advanced degrees. These are not only are easier to access, they also can be pursued on your schedule. Fighting traffic to get to your night class is the past The classroom is now a lecture being read while you drink your morning tea or coffee.
The High-Value Topic
Technology is becoming a key part of more and more jobs. One of the best ways to get ahead is to add some technical skills to your resume. Jobs in IT tend to pay well and provide great benefits. That’s not all. Adding IT skills to any resume can expand opportunities and allow you to apply for higher paying positions. Even better, IT skills are the most common ones available on the Internet. A simple search on any IT topic will bring up pages of examples. Then adding “training” to the search term will bring up as many ways to learn about the topic.
IT training is easy to find and you can even find a lot of great examples for free. The problem is that you have to have a good foundation of knowledge to be able to piece together those examples into cohesive knowledge. This is where virtual classes and boot camps bridge the gap. They provide traditional learning approaches while being current, affordable, and accessible.
Our Approach
A boot camp or class can provide a lot of knowledge, but it still isn’t cheap. The cost can even be too much to take on for someone that is between jobs or struggling in their current position. We have looked at ways to reduce the cost burden while improving quality. This is accomplished by doing two things. First, split up the big boot camp approach into smaller, “bite-sized” pieces. Next, focus on each small course providing a way to increase revenue through new business or add skills to push for that raise.
Our first course teaches web development, but the focus is on making those web development skills work for you. The primary outcome of this course is creating and launching a business that is your very own. Along with a foundation of web development skills, we cover a wide range of entrepreneurial skills. The classes also include concrete applications like marketing, branding, and building out a scalable system. Our goal is to start from zero and teach IT skills to each student through examples and applications that they can use to improve their situation immediately. Is there a resume that is not improved by adding web development and creating a business to it?
The primary goal of Develpreneur.com is to create better developers. We realize it takes time and money to further skills like these. Thus, we have found the best approach is to start with some skills that can save you time and help you earn money as part of improving your career and your personal brand.
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