Searching for a job is always tough.
You have to dust off your interview skills, hunt through thousands of different applications, and then try and figure out a way to stand out from the crowd. It’s fraught with expectations, worries, and concerns. This is made all the worse by the fact that many employers don’t even deign to send rejection letters anymore; which means you can be hanging on waiting for news that’s never going to come.
It’s in the midst of all of this that many people find themselves wondering if they should retrain. Retraining is a positive idea, especially if you feel you have exhausted your options within your existing field. However, retraining is not without its problems. It’s not an easy solution to the fact you haven’t found a new role that applies to your previous credentials. It’s a life-changing decision rather than a stop-gap; it’s committing to changing your career trajectory and career choices for the foreseeable future.
When you’re contemplating making a genuinely life-changing decision, a little guidance is never going to go amiss. Retraining can be positive; it can be a force for good, but the way in which you go about retraining can determine whether or not it can be a successful route forward for you. To help you do this, here are a list of the things you should do to get retraining right – and the things you most definitely shouldn’t, too.
DO: Take It Seriously
As has been mentioned, you have to take retraining seriously. It’s not a decision you can make and then double back on; or at least, it’s not a decision that you can make and double back on without it potentially costing you a lot of money to do so.
If you decide to retrain in a fit of pique and anger about the dearth of good jobs available in your existing niche, then that’s not the best motivator. Retraining isn’t just a step on a tick box “what to do when you can’t find a job” exercise; it’s more than that. It’s a total change of future strategy. Give yourself time to think through your options. When you make a decision, you’re going to need a few weeks just to run it through your mind multiple times and decide whether or not it’s truly the course that you want to explore.
DON’T: Jump In Without Research
You might like the sound of a job, but that doesn’t mean you should drop everything and retrain in it. You need to spend a little time getting to the nitty gritty of what that career actually means, rather than the idealized version of it you have in your head.
Google will have your back on this. Some combination of search terms such as…
“[job you want to do] + real life experiences”
… should bring forth a multitude of real accounts from people who have worked in that occupation. This is essential information; you have to outweigh the pros and cons that you encounter. Only proceed when you’re 100% sure of what the role you’re looking to retrain for truly entails.
DO: Pick An In-Demand Industry
If you’ve always wanted to be a graphic designer, that’s great – but it’s also a pretty packed industry. If you choose to enter into an industry that is already well-stocked for staff, then you could spend a lot of money on training… only to find yourself back to the start, waiting for jobs to come up, trying to think of innovative ways to make yourself stand out from the pack.
Instead, select an industry that is showing a shortage of future recruits, so there’s going to be somewhere for you to go when your training is complete. For example, healthcare, technical jobs, and programming are all experiencing staff shortages now that are only going to get worse. You study with UMA and combine healthcare and tech with a billing technician job; or you could look into training yourself in the fundamentals of programming languages. By choosing industries that are already lacking in staff, you improve your chances of guaranteeing yourself work in the future.
DON’T: Expect Nothing But Good Things
When you decide on your industry and have done your research, you’re then going to be looking for where you want to train. It’s at this point that things can get rough. There are way too many training academies which thrive on common scams, offering their students very little in terms of practical advice – but making a fortune from doing so.
You have to research any institution you’re thinking of studying with – and then you have to research them some more. Here are a few key questions you’re going to need to be able to answer before you sign up for any course:
- Is the qualification professionally recognized?
- What do other people say about the institution? Just Googling the name of the place and adding the word “scam” should bring up any results that can answer this.
- How long has the institution been in business? Does it have a good track record for students going on to find jobs?
Basically, you need to be permanently on your guard. Only sign up for a course when you’re absolutely certain it’s what you need it to be.
DO: Prepare To Learn
If you’ve been out of school for awhile, you might find the learning experience is very different to the one that you remember. Your brain is out of practice when it comes to learning new information, so it might take awhile for you to get up to speed.
Help this along by researching a subject – any subject, as what matters is practicing the ability to retain information – for a few days. Then sit a simple online quiz about that subject. Over time, you will be able to increase your ability to learn, which is going to make integrating back into a learning atmosphere all the easier.
By following the above, you give yourself a good chance of retraining in a positive way – one that is going to afford you many career options in the future. Good luck – though if you’ve stuck to the dos and don’ts, luck is out of the equation. You’re ready.
