Education Isn"t Always In Schools
Some people believe that the only way you can successfully learn most things is by going to school for them. While it is true that a lot of great learning happens in school, a lot of times people attend classes for years and end up learning very little of any consequence. While technical skills tend to be very important to your career, there are a lot of times when they aren't the most important tool in your toolbox. These occasions are fairly frequent in more human-centric professions such as customer service and sales, where technical skills relate more to the method of doing your job than the ultimate purpose of it.
The Purpose
Education has been taken to mean a lot of different things by different people. Some folks think education is nothing more than the number of degrees hanging on your wall, while other people think education is how well you speak or perform a particular function. While these are reasonable, at its heart, education is just growth. A truly technically skilled individual is only as good as his or her emotional maturity, and one doesn't pick up much of that through sitting in a classroom listening to someone else talk. Overall, you learn most of your best lessons in the real world.
Where to Get Educated
Naturally, taking a few classes is great, provided they aren't just degree requirements. But other great places to learn include working in a staffing agency and trying out a bunch of different workplaces. While the standards to get into a quality staffing company are strict, they're excellent encouragement to do more than just "the bare minimum." You can also do volunteer work at charitable places, dial for dollars, help out at a soup kitchen or help Habitat for Humanity build somebody a house or two. There are tons of places to get some real world experience, and you'd be wise to try as many as you can. Once you're a learned individual, you'll be more than prepared to apply directly to a specific company or get hired via recruiting agencies such as Accounting Principals.
How This Helps Your Career
It's easy to understand how taking an acting class can help you relate to other people and express yourself better, but it might not be as easy to relate volunteer work to the workplace. Think about how your experiences doing good things for other people translate into becoming a more helpful, more deliberately focused worker, and then imagine how you can translate that self-discipline and desire to help others into being better at your job. The school of life may not hand out degrees, but it does give you a great education.
What great lessons have YOU learned from the real world?
The Purpose
Education has been taken to mean a lot of different things by different people. Some folks think education is nothing more than the number of degrees hanging on your wall, while other people think education is how well you speak or perform a particular function. While these are reasonable, at its heart, education is just growth. A truly technically skilled individual is only as good as his or her emotional maturity, and one doesn't pick up much of that through sitting in a classroom listening to someone else talk. Overall, you learn most of your best lessons in the real world.
Where to Get Educated
Naturally, taking a few classes is great, provided they aren't just degree requirements. But other great places to learn include working in a staffing agency and trying out a bunch of different workplaces. While the standards to get into a quality staffing company are strict, they're excellent encouragement to do more than just "the bare minimum." You can also do volunteer work at charitable places, dial for dollars, help out at a soup kitchen or help Habitat for Humanity build somebody a house or two. There are tons of places to get some real world experience, and you'd be wise to try as many as you can. Once you're a learned individual, you'll be more than prepared to apply directly to a specific company or get hired via recruiting agencies such as Accounting Principals.
How This Helps Your Career
It's easy to understand how taking an acting class can help you relate to other people and express yourself better, but it might not be as easy to relate volunteer work to the workplace. Think about how your experiences doing good things for other people translate into becoming a more helpful, more deliberately focused worker, and then imagine how you can translate that self-discipline and desire to help others into being better at your job. The school of life may not hand out degrees, but it does give you a great education.
What great lessons have YOU learned from the real world?