Have you ever wondered what sets a top performer from the rest of the pack?
What factors decide who gets a raise, who gets hired or promoted, and who doesn’t?
What’s the difference between the average rat racer and the one who not only outruns the system but gets to be at the top quartiles?
You may think of connections, influence, power, politics, talent, or plain luck.
The thing is all these things can be rooted down to one precious asset that every individual possesses.
Successful People’s Most Valuable Asset
This asset is directly proportional to your earnings power and correlates to your ability to make any potential or existing employer value you.
You can even become your own employer, or the employer of others, if you truly hone this asset to its best.
Whatever you do with it will benefit you and others around you. Besides the cultivation of this asset never ends.
It’s not your riches or connections, not even the degrees you painstakingly earned. It goes much deeper and more organic than that.
The most valuable of human assets is your mind.
Whatever skill, strategy, idea, or product your mind has and creates, value may be derived from it. It is the measure of this value that ultimately determines where you end up in life.
“The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” – Buddha
Lifetime Benefits of Continuing Education
In developing and shaping the mind, nothing comes close to the power of education.
“Education is the great engine to personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that the child of a farm worker can become the president of a great nation.” – Nelson Mandela
A study by High/Scope Educational Research Foundation of Ypsilanti, Michigan found that the quality of early childhood education in children born into poverty (therefore with less means to succeed in life compared to those born in affluence) very much affected their future earning power.
- It was found that at age 27, 29% those exposed to high-quality early education earned $2,000 more per month than those with no exposure, at 7%.
- Those with better early education also scored higher on home and car ownership versus their counterparts with no preschool program exposure.
But the benefits of education are not limited to school age children and teens. Even professionals already working their way up in the labor market are reaping the rewards.
The online newspaper The EvoLLLution released a research paper entitled “Lifelong Education and Labor Market Needs,” in which the findings state:
- 96% of employers believe continuing education improves job performance.
- 87% of employers believe continuing education carries a positive impact on pay scale, with many citing a direct correlation.
- 78% of employers factor continuing education into promotions, since this allows employees to manage the skills gap between entry-level and mid-level positions.
Even those past working age can still benefit from lifelong learning.
How?
A Senior Citizen’s Guide article cited a 1990s brain research, with studies conducted in many research facilities including Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Duke. The research showed that:
- keeping one’s brain stimulated helps retain mental alertness in aging individuals.
- Even an aging brain can grow new pathways and connections through constant challenge and stimulation.
The Journal of Online Learning and Teaching even published a study where adult learners, aged 50 to 65, who went back to school and learned online ended up becoming as, or even more successful than, their younger student counterparts.
This is good news to the almost half, or 43% for men and 49% for women, of the US adult population, aged 50 plus, recorded by the National Center for Education Statistics who are enrolled in some type of lifelong education.
Limitations to Education’s Accessibility
Not too long ago, education was reserved for the privileged few. That is not the case now, but that doesn’t mean anyone can just easily obtain the education they want or deserve.
Despite education being made available to everyone interested, not everyone can readily access it. For working adults, stay-at-home parents, senior citizens, people with limited mobility, career changers, and others, the pursuit of education is a challenge, geographically and schedule-wise.
Not even the ones with a lot of free time on their hands can afford to travel.
The Cost of Ongoing Education
In a recent report by COLLEGEdata, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2014–2015 school year is:
- $31,231 at private colleges
- $9,139 for state residents attending public colleges
- $22,958 for out-of-state residents in public universities
Other typical expenses for those attending physical schools include room and board, books and school materials, and other miscellaneous fees.
Again, the College Board reported that the average cost of room and board in SY 2014–2015 is:
- anywhere from $9,804 at four-year public schools to $11,188 at private schools
The average cost for books and supplies for SY 2014–2015 is:
- $1,146 at public colleges and $1,244 at private colleges
The average cost for transportation and other personal expenses for SY 2014–2015 is:
- anywhere from $2,609 at private colleges to $3,242 at public universities
These figures are very daunting for the average family.
In fact, according to a 2012 article in the Huffington Post, in 30 years, the tuition fee cost for college education in the US has increased twelve-fold, or 1,120% since 1978, even higher than the rate of inflation for the same time period.
This meteoric rise in the cost of education is, understandably, a major reason behind some people’s reluctance to pursue quality or even basic, further education.
The Importance of Online Learning for Lifelong Education
The arrival of online learning as an alternative to traditional classroom-type education serves as a welcome answer to learners faced with financial and geographical limitations.
Online learning has made learning possible for:
- The stay- at-home mom
- The Asian student interested in taking up a subject only available in another continent
- A working father looking to enroll in a management course after work
- A full-time student wanting to cross register with another school from across the state
The world’s response to online learning as a more convenient and affordable alternative shows in the following statistics:
According to a research published in January 2013 by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman for the Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group entitled “Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States,” also initially known as the Sloan Online Survey:
- From less than half in 2002, 69.1% of chief academic leaders say online learning is critical to their long-term strategy, the highest in a ten-year period.
- Students taking at least one online course increased by 572,000 from 2010 to 2011 to reach a total of 6.7 million.
- In 2012, 77% of academic leaders rate the learning outcomes of online education as the same as or superior to face-to-face education compared to 57.2% in 2003.
In an Ambient Insight Research report:
The market for self-paced eLearning reached $42.7 billion globally in 2013, with a 4.4% five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
With such good prognosis for online learning, employers are also increasingly taking notice.
Choosing Legitimate eLearning Sites
There are a myriad of choices available online if you’re searching for a potential eLearning course to try. But of course, you get what you pay for, so make sure the courses and learning institutions you choose are well reviewed.
If you want to get your feet wet at online learning and not have to pay in full first, sites like Cloudswave partner with several online learning institutions to offer discount coupons to interested parties.
Examples of eLearning Sites
For example, did you know that being bilingual actually delays the onset of dementia?
If you want to learn a new language in the most efficient way possible, you can try out:
- Babbel’s comprehensive learning system to make sure you’ve got everything covered, or
- Pimsleur’s 30-minutes-a-day learning session for concise lessons if the time you can spare is limited. (Get 50% off any language at Pimsleur here.)
If your goal is to make a career change or to learn a skill/trade that will help you earn extra cash, learning web or mobile app development is very lucrative at this time.
For example, statistics from PayScale show that:
- The average web app developer in the US takes home $58,583 or roughly $59,000 annually.
- The pay scale for a mobile app developer in the US is, on average, $70,421 annually.
- The median pay scale for a web developer in the US is $53,675 annually.
Treehouse offers online courses for web design and development, as well as iOS. (Get 30% off Treehouse Basic and Pro plans here.)
Final word
The previously enumerated classes are just some of the sources you can find online today to enhance your lifelong learning goals.
Resources like Coursera, ALISON, and edX, among others, even provide free lessons. You’ll have to pay for a certificate, of course, but if you’re curious about computer science, chemical engineering, or nursing and want to see if the topic interests you enough, trying them out may eventually lead you to a for-pay course that you can use for future employment.
Keeping the mind in top shape is a lifetime investment that will reap lasting rewards.
As Albert Einstein, one of history’s revered geniuses, was quoted to have said: “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.“
The post The Numbers Have Spoken: eLearning Is the Wave of the Future appeared first on Cloudswave Blog.