The lid is off the
Pandora’s box of open education. Khan Academy, MITx, P2PU, Open Badges,
Udacity, Coursera. The providers of free online education are springing up left
and right, andhundreds of thousands of people from nearly every
country in the world are jumping at the chance to educate themselves. And
though knowledge is an end in itself, it’s only natural that students of these
free courses would want to apply their newly acquired skills in promoting themselves
in the job market.
Trouble
is, this revolution in education is bound to be met with skepticism and
intransigence, as revolutions often are. We are not yet to the point where a
free, self-directed Internet course is given the same respect as a course from
a traditional university, even if it’s identical in every way. Employers might
need some help seeing the light, and that requires you to do some selling.
We’ve come up with a few ideas on how to do that.
Instead
of seeing the lack of interaction with a teacher in a self-directed course as a
weakness, turn it into a strength and sell it as such to your employer. Neither
traditional brick-and-mortar schools nor paid online schools can claim to
require the level of self-motivation needed by students to undertake and finish
a self-education course. There’s no threat of expulsion due to failure, no
danger of wasted tuition money, and no teacher constantly checking up on you.
There’s just you, driving yourself to learn for learning’s sake.
LinkedIn
makes it possible for you to brag 24/7 about all those courses you’ve taken of
your own volition. It’s probably not advisable to list them under “Education,”
as you don’t want to invoke any negative reactions in employers who don’t yet
see self-education as legitimate education. Instead, under the “Edit Profile”
tab you’ll find an option to “Add sections to reflect achievements and
experiences.” Click the icon then select “Courses” from the drop-down menu. Now
every course you complete will be listed under its own special “Courses”
section, listed by job for which it applies.
If
you can demonstrate to an employer exactly what steps you took to make your
self-education as legitimate as possible, you make your job of selling that
education that much easier. For example, Udacity offers the option of taking
exams in officially administered testing centers through a partnership with
Pearson VUE. So before you spend a bunch of time on a course, first make sure
that you will have such a way of proving you were the one who took the test and
passed.
With
a bit of research, you can most likely find a syllabus online for a class at a
traditional university that closely resembles the course you took. In some
cases, likeMITx’s 6.002x Circuits & Electronics class, the
free course is exactly the same and just as hard as the course offered on
campus. Bring both syllabi to your interview in case the employer asks to see
them.
Since
you’re already bringing in the syllabus, go ahead and bring all the work you
did for your open education class to your interview: homework, exams, projects,
everything. Put the icing on the cake by also including in your portfolio
projects you completed after the course was concluded using the knowledge you
gleaned from the class. There is no better proof that the course was legitimate
and benefited you than by being able to show any interested person what you can
now do as a result of taking the class.
The
beauty of open education is … it’s open. Before your interview, print off the
directions for signing up for an account with Udacity, Khan Academy, or
whatever resource you used for your classes. Give these directions to your
potential employers and urge them to check out the class themselves. If they’ve
been writing off your class as a joke or an easy A, they’ll change their tune
once they see what you went through, or even better, when they try some of the
questions and they can’t answer them.
To
get your interview discussion away from the semantics of what exactly defines
education and into the cold, hard realities of whether you can do the job,
request a test. When you set up the interview you can ask the interviewer to
prepare a little quiz for you to prove your skills when you meet, or if you
want to make it a bit more subtle you can throw out the idea of a test when the
subject of your self-education arises in the interview. If the latter puts him
too much on the spot, offer to come back to take it. After all, a second
meeting is never a bad thing.
8.
Dispel the myths:
Verbal
and nonverbal communication skills are important for all job candidates, not
just ones with self-education experience. Your interviewer may entertain some
of the same biases that are sometimes applied against online degree holders,
that they’re somehow strange, or can’t communicate face-to-face, or don’t know
how to present themselves in an office environment. Some of the best selling
you can do is to go out of your way to dress presentably, be personable, make
eye contact, and generally make a good name for students of self-education
everywhere.
9.
Name names:
One
of the most tried and true sales techniques is the endorsement: tying a
well-known, trusted source to a new, untested product to lend it reliability by
association. In this case, your self-education is the unknown product. The
endorsements you’ll want to highlight to employers are the partnerships with
top-quality American universities and companies. Udacity was founded partly by
Google VP and Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun. Coursera has partnered with
Caltech, Duke, Princeton, Rice, and more. The major name behind MITx is
obvious. Such associations give people something to hold onto to reassure them
and make them confident in the skills you learned from self-education.
10. Commit:
What we mean by this is, don’t apologize
for the fact that some of your education was free of charge and self-directed.
In all likelihood, you took more away from it than some of your college courses
because you took it when you were older and wiser and more dedicated to
bettering yourself. If that’s the case, say it! Say something like, “It was the
best money I ever spent!” It’s all about changing attitudes, and if you believe
strongly in the power of self-education, you can make others believe in it, too.
Sourced From : http://www.onlinecolleges.net
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