Last Updated on February 14, 2023 by admin
15 Reasons Why a Quality Education Can Advance Your Career
Knowledge is power. It can open doors, increase opportunities, and above all else, help you understand the world around you. One of the best ways to gain knowledge is through education.
Due to the way tuition costs rise by 1-2% every year, many have come to question the value of a traditional college education. And, in truth, there are many ways now that you can educate yourself aside from a four-year degree.
Quality education can help you advance your career much farther than it otherwise might go. Don’t believe us? Here are 15 reasons why education, whether traditional, short-term, or online, can benefit your career more than anything else.
1. Education Fuels Personal Development
One reason that education can help you advance your career is that education can fuel your personal growth and development. This doesn’t just mean that you learn more about yourself from studying books. Rather, you learn more about your personality type, the way you work, and how you connect with others.
Knowing yourself and how you can grow to the best version of yourself can help you figure out how to advance your career.
2. Completed Courses Demonstrate Work Ethic
Many people worry that their college degree will be judged poorly due to its less than stellar name, job irrelevancy, or online status. However, many employees worry more about the completion of a degree over its specific field or type. Having a degree in a relevant field can give you an advantage over other candidates, but for the most part, they want to see that you’ve completed a course of study.
Why is this? Well, regardless of the field, the fact that you managed to finish out a 2, 4, or 6-year degree path indicates that you have at least a little of a work ethic driving you. This bodes well for how you’ll function as an employee.
3. You Can Enhance Your Soft Skills
Another reason that education can help you go farther in the workforce is that it helps you enhance your soft skills. What are soft skills, you may ask? Soft skills are, in essence, personality traits that make it easier for you to work. These can include your ability to relate to others, convince others of your point, research, or adapt to new circumstances.
While these soft skills can be taught, they’re harder to learn than hard or technical skills. Learning soft skills to advance your career tends to happen alongside the more technical learning you get from a standard 4-year degree.
4. Increased Creativity and Flexibility
Piggybacking off of the last point, creativity and flexibility are two soft skills that a quality education will teach you along the way. While many classes try to set assignment and exam due dates at the beginning of the semester, these dates may be altered through the course of the class. This, combined with the need to juggle multiple responsibilities between your classes and other academic honors, increases your flexibility.
Many collegiate courses also help you to engage your creativity, as you need to find new ways to tackle research topics. Some courses may even directly engage with your creative impulses, like art, music, or theater.
5. Further Education Boosts Your Employability
Another way that education helps you to advance your career is by increasing your employability. This is due, in part, to the demonstrated work ethic we discussed above. However, this also manifests in the form of career and field-specific education. Someone with a degree in marketing will be more likely to get a marketing job than someone with a degree in, say, nursing.
Some jobs may even require a certain level of education to pursue, as we’ll discuss in further detail later.
6. Knowing More Increases Your Confidence
As prevalent as impostor syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect are, learning more and knowing more can do wonders for your confidence. Think back to the last time you felt out of your depth in the workplace. Did you feel confident, like you could handle the demands thrown your way? Chances are, you didn’t, and instead felt overwhelmed.
Learning more things can also prove to you that you can, in fact, discover things you enjoy and increase your available career paths. This, in itself, can boost your confidence.
7. Higher Education Grows Your Network
This benefit relates more to a traditional college education than an online one. However, any form of continued education can help you increase your professional network. Your fellow classmates may one day open their own businesses, or work for employers where they can put in a good word for you. Your teachers have points of contact in your field of interest, making them an invaluable resource.
In fact, if you have a career in the arts, the connections you form during your college education can benefit you as much or more than the skills you hone during that same period. (Plus, professors make exceptional references to employers.)
8. Increases Job Security
Think about the types of jobs available to you if you only hold a high school diploma with no other certifications. Most of these jobs include service industry, warehouse, and retail positions. This leaves you at the whims of the job market and the competence of your store manager.
Whether you decide to earn a degree or get forklift certification, you’re making yourself more valuable to your job. That means that, when the time comes for layoffs and other cullings, you’re more likely to keep your job than your fellows. It also means that you can transfer your skills to a new place of employment, should you so desire.
9. Certain Jobs Require Further or Continuing Education
If you’re interested in advancing your nursing career or getting into the insurance industry, you’re not going much of anywhere without a degree or a license. Nor will you be able to fix the plumbing or electricity in someone’s home. Nor can you style someone’s hair or tattoo their skin.
Careers like these require a certain level of education to even begin, much less advance. As such, educating yourself can be the key to opening these career paths to you.
10. Increase Your Critical Thinking Skills
This next point depends entirely on the quality of the education you receive. However, getting an education can increase your critical thinking skills. Learning to think critically isn’t taught in many public schools due to the sheer level of coursework they have to get through before the end of the year. However, certain classes like Speech and Debate, Philosophy, or Logic can help you understand how to think about what you hear and read.
Increasing your critical thinking skills also makes you more likely to question your own biases and treat your employees as equals. This will, in turn, improve your soft or relational skills.
11. Increased Average Pay
It’s a truism of the education industry that the higher of a degree you have, the higher of a paycheck you’ll be able to command. While many external factors can wreak havoc on the job market, making this seem like a lie, there is a kernel of truth still there.
The average person with a high school diploma and no other certifications will earn less than, say, an associate’s degree holder. That associate’s degree holder will earn less than someone with a bachelor’s degree due to the careers they can access. Someone with a master’s degree will have access to higher-paying jobs than those without one.
The more degrees and certifications you have, the more opportunities you have to find work. More opportunities mean that you have a greater chance of finding a job that pays well.
12. Sometimes, the Name Speaks for Itself
As much as we like to pretend that employers don’t set much stock in names, there are certain times where a name speaks for itself. Someone that has attended Tulane or Harvard will elicit much more interest from an employer than someone who attended their local technical or four-year university.
Even if their degree is the same, there’s a certain level of prestige and quality associated with the name of the university you attended. That doesn’t mean you should force yourself to take on unreasonable amounts of debt to go there. However, it does mean that if you have the choice, you shouldn’t discount the weight certain institutional names can hold.
13. Education Can Teach You Social Skills
Whether you receive your education in-person or online, you’re learning social skills and professional etiquette. You often learn how you’re supposed to email or speak with your professors (and thus, your bosses) while in school, where the consequences for sending a poorly-worded email extend to a stern talking-to after class. If you send an unprofessional email in the workplace, that can spell the end of your career.
Plus, through working with your fellow students on group projects or meeting for study groups, you can learn how to socialize with people in a professional setting. Or socialize in general, if you haven’t had much experience with doing so. By learning how to interact with others in a professional way, you’re able to advance your career to the next level. (It certainly helps to know how to reach the individuals in power.)
14. Education Identifies Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Another way that education can help you figure out how to advance your career is by identifying your strengths and weaknesses. The rigors of a college education or a short-term crash course can help you understand how you handle high-stress situations. It can also give you greater insight into the way you learn, the way you research, how you solve problems, and other such skills.
This lets you identify areas where you’re weak and can improve as well. For example, maybe you’re a dab hand at time management but struggle with the social aspects of your position. You might not have realized that without the social pressures in an academic environment. Alternatively, you may thrive under deadline pressure but struggle with organizational skills.
By allowing you to identify your strengths and weaknesses, a high-quality education can help you advance your career to the next level.
15. You Can Move to Different Fields
Last but certainly not least, increasing your education level means that you can move into different fields. As young adults, many of us got pushed into degrees or career paths for which we were not suited. Either parental pressures or the promise of high pay pushed us into studying something we barely understood, much less enjoyed. This can, by definition, limit your career prospects to that specific field.
However, if you choose to continue your education, you can expand your knowledge base and move into new and exciting fields. You can learn to code instead of being stuck in marketing meetings all day. You can help people live healthier lives instead of flipping burgers. Education means that your current career path doesn’t need to be your permanent destination. Instead, you have the freedom to move wherever you wish.
You Need an Education to Advance Your Career
Let’s face facts: In order to advance your career, you need to advance your education. Whether you go for a license or a four-year degree, by increasing what you know, you open up career opportunities and increase your confidence. You increase your employability and thus your security and pay rate. Education means that you have more choices and can make the best selection from the options available to you.
Give yourself the opportunities you deserve. Learn new skills to advance your career today. And, if you need more help in doing so, check out the Career section of our blog. We update each day with more helpful articles like this one to help you bring your career to the next level.
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