// Finally Lose Weight

There are a range of options on the market for people hoping to get into working with computers. For assistance in selecting the right one for you, seek out a training provider that will help you to work out which career will match your personal profile, as well as explaining the job responsibilities, to confirm you’re on the right track. If you’re mulling over advancing your technological abilities, maybe by improving your office user skills, or even becoming an IT professional, you can choose from many training options.

By reducing overhead structures, there are now companies offering modern courses with excellent training and mentoring for much lower prices than those charged by old-school colleges.

Wouldn’t it be great to know for sure that our jobs will always be secure and our work prospects are protected, but the likely scenario for most jobs around the UK right now appears to be that security just isn’t there anymore. Of course, a quickly growing market-place, with huge staffing demands (because of a massive shortage of trained workers), provides a market for proper job security.

Using the Information Technology (IT) industry for example, a key e-Skills analysis showed major skills shortages across the UK of around 26 percent. That means for every four jobs that are available throughout computing, we have only 3 certified professionals to fill that need. This single concept alone reveals why the country needs considerably more people to get into the IT sector. With the market evolving at such a rate, there really isn’t any other area of industry worth taking into account for your new career.

So if the IT sector presents some unique job possibilities for us - then what are the questions we need to ask and which factors should we be considering?

For the most part, your average person doesn’t know how they should get into Information Technology, or even which area they should be considering getting trained in. As without any previous experience in Information Technology, how should we possibly be expected to understand what a particular job actually consists of? To work through this, a discussion is necessary, covering many unique issues:

* Your personality can play a major role - what things get your juices flowing, and what are the activities that get you down.

* What length of time can you allocate for the training process?

* Where is the salary on a scale of importance - is it the most important thing, or does job satisfaction rate further up on the scale of your priorities?

* Learning what typical job areas and markets are - and what makes them different.

* What effort, commitment and time you’re prepared to put into obtaining your certification.

For most of us, considering all these ideas tends to require the help of a professional that knows what they’re talking about. And not just the accreditations - but the commercial needs and expectations also.

If you forget everything else - then just remember this: You absolutely must have proper 24×7 instructor support. You will have so many problems later if you don’t follow this rule rigidly. Be wary of any training providers which use call-centres ‘out-of-hours’ - where an advisor will call back during standard office hours. This is useless when you’re stuck and need an answer now.

Keep your eyes open for training schools that utilise many support facilities across multiple time-zones. Every one of them needs to be seamlessly combined to offer a simple interface and access round-the-clock, when it suits you, with the minimum of hassle. If you opt for less than online 24×7 support, you’ll quickly find yourself regretting it. You might not want to use the service in the middle of the night, but you’re bound to use weekends, evenings and early mornings at some point.

It’s likely that you’ve always enjoyed practical work - a ‘hands-on’ personality type. Typically, the painful task of reading endless manuals would be considered as a last resort, but you really wouldn’t enjoy it. Check out video-based multimedia instruction if book-based learning really isn’t your style. Studies in learning psychology have shown that much more of what we learn in remembered when we receive multi-sensorial input, and we put into practice what we’ve been studying.

Find a course where you’ll receive a selection of DVD-ROM’s - you’ll learn by watching video tutorials and demonstrations, with the facility to fine-tune your skills in fully interactive practice sessions. It’s imperative to see courseware examples from each company you’re contemplating. It’s essential they incorporate video demo’s and interactive elements such as practice lab’s.

Purely on-line training should be avoided. Physical CD or DVD ROM materials are preferable where possible, enabling them to be used at your convenience - it’s not wise to be held hostage to your broadband being ‘up’ 100 percent of the time.

Sometimes students are under the impression that the traditional school, college or university path is the right way even now. So why are commercially accredited qualifications becoming more in demand? As we require increasingly more effective technological know-how, industry has been required to move to the specialised training that the vendors themselves supply - for example companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, CISCO and CompTIA. This usually turns out to involve less time and financial outlay. In essence, only that which is required is learned. It’s slightly more broad than that, but the principle remains that students need to focus on the exact skills required (alongside some required background) - without overdoing the detail in every other area - in the way that academic establishments often do.

When an employer is aware what areas they need covered, then they simply need to advertise for a person with the appropriate exam numbers. Vendor-based syllabuses are all based on the same criteria and can’t change from one establishment to the next (in the way that degree courses can).

Exam ‘guarantees’ are sometimes offered as part of a training package - they always involve paying for the exam fees up-front, when you pay for the rest of your course. But before you get taken in by the chance of a guarantee, be aware of the facts:

We all know that we’re still being charged for it - obviously it has been inserted into the overall figure from the course provider. Certainly, it’s not a freebie (it’s just marketing companies think we’ll fall for anything they say!) Students who go in for their examinations when it’s appropriate, paying as they go are much better placed to get through first time. They’re aware of their spending and prepare more appropriately to make sure they’re ready.

Don’t pay up-front, but seek out the best deal for you at the time, and save having to find the money early. In addition, it’s then your choice where to take your exam - so you can find somewhere local. Why borrow the money or pay in advance (plus interest of course) on examination fees when there’s absolutely nothing that says you have to? A lot of profit is made by companies charging all their exam fees up-front - and then cashing in when they’re not all taken. Additionally, you should consider what an ‘exam guarantee’ really means. Most companies will not pay for re-takes until you have demonstrated conclusively that you won’t fail again.

With the average price of Pro-metric and VUE examinations coming in at around 112 pounds in the UK, it makes sense to pay as you go. Not to fork out thousands extra in up-front costs. Commitment, effort and practice with quality exam preparation systems are the factors that really get you through.

Consider only training courses that’ll move onto commercially approved qualifications. There are loads of small colleges promoting ‘in-house’ certificates which are worthless in the real world. Unless the accreditation comes from a big-hitter like Microsoft, CompTIA, Adobe or Cisco, then you may discover it will be commercially useless - as it’ll be an unknown commodity.