Looking for your first job can be daunting and applying for numerous positions without success can be demoralizing and demotivating. There is huge competition out there and finding ways to make yourself stand out with limited or no experience can be difficult.
Feel more in control of your job search
Taking advantage of the huge amount of online courses to develop your skills, will not only give you more confidence and more skills to add to your CV, it will also help you to keep motivated and positive. A lot of the job application process is out of your control and it can be very difficult to keep picking yourself up after rejections and disappointments. Setting aside time to take online courses will help you feel more in control and boost your future job prospects.
Online learning shown to improve mental health
Results of a study published by think tank Demos last year, revealed that 10% of the UK’s total economic output was linked to online learning. Of the 20,000 UK citizens polled for the research, 1 in 3 of them had used online learning to help them get a new job. The report also revealed that continued online learning is a fantastic way to improve your salary, on average boosting it by £3640 per year. It estimated that 20 million people in Britain felt that online learning has, at some stage, contributed to their professional output. Furthermore, and crucially, online learning was also shown to improve our mental health with more than three quarters of people who learn online (77%) recognising the benefits to personal wellbeing.
The set of FREE courses available through the government’s skills toolkit, has some fantastic online learning opportunities to improve skills in areas such as practical maths, computer essentials, personal growth & wellbeing, business & finance, digital design & marketing and computer science & coding. There are various levels of courses available within each discipline.
Pearson has also recently developed a series of employability skills courses designed to help people entering the professional workplace build those core skills needed for long-term success, like communication, complex decision-making and creativity. These online, self-paced short courses feature real-world projects and one-to-one mentoring, helping learners gain the experience they need to set themselves apart in the graduate and ‘early career’ employment market. You can review the 10 courses currently available via their website. All these courses are currently FREE until 19th March 2021.
There are many other free online courses available so it is worth searching to see what is right for you and what will add the most value to your job search and career.
