Many people want to make more of their lives. They want to push themselves further, be better, and achieve as much as possible. That might mean switching careers entirely at some point, and that is a frightening thing to do even if you definitely know that it needs to be done. Thankfully, some online degrees and colleges can make the switch much easier; you can study for whatever it is you want to do online, and still continue in your current career, at least until you have gained your new qualification.
If you want to become a social worker, for example, you will need a BSW (Bachelor of Social Work), and this is one of the many qualifications that can now be gained online. Since social work is such an important career and one that can make such a difference to so many, it’s exactly the kind of career that those who want to change their lives and achieve more would choose. The question has to be then, can an online social work degree help you achieve more? Is it worth taking the time and trouble to sign up for and study for? Read on to find out, and you can make up your own mind.
Program Choice
If you want to study for a BSW, you don’t want to be stuck with only a small number of choices. You need to be able to take your time and decide which program is best for you, taking several different factors into account. Having a lot of choice in the matter is crucial; without options, you might find you have no route to go down, and someone who may well have made an excellent social worker would instead choose a different career or not try to change their lives at all. If you want to achieve more in your life, this is not a good position to be in.
If you can find an online BSW course that will challenge you, give you interesting things to do, teach you as much as possible, and give you the scope to continue with self-study when required, you will have found a great course to sign up for. Some BSW degrees are better than others, and if you want to achieve more, having the amount of choice you do, and taking the time to carry out as much research as you can, really will make all the difference. The last thing you would want is to study hard and then discover that the course you attended hasn’t given you the skills and knowledge you truly need.
Don’t rush into signing up for any course. Check our reviews and testimonials, seek out advice from employers and recruitment experts, and find out just what the course entails. When you have this information, you can narrow down your choices and start learning for your BSW in the place that suits you best and offers you the most. This is how you can achieve more.
Lower Costs
Cost is a huge factor when it comes to college and learning. Even if having a degree in a specific subject is something you need to further your career (or start it altogether), if the cost is prohibitive, then you’ll need to think about doing something else. This can be a crushing blow, especially if you have been preparing for carrying out social work for many years, and it’s all you can imagine yourself doing. Without being able to afford your BSW, you just won’t be able to be a social worker at all.
This is where an online course can have its benefits. Many online courses cost less than a traditional course would do. This is because there are fewer overheads to take into account, plus the fact that there are no limits on the number of students who can sign up, unlike in a standard, brick and mortar college that will have only a certain number of students who can apply. In other words, the price might be lower, but more students can sign up, so the college won’t be losing out, but the student will be gaining a lot.
Not only that, but you can take your time with your course. You can work at your own pace, which means you don’t have to quit your day job to learn. You won’t lose out on any money in this way, whereas signing up to a course in a traditional college would mean working – at least full time – would be hard.
Lower costs all round means that what might have been impossible in the past has now been opened up to many people. Whether you want to take a BSW straight from high school or you have waited many years for the chance and are now in a position to do it later in life, the option is there for you to learn online and gain a degree that is recognized everywhere.
A More Comfortable Learning Environment
In the past, there was one way to learn. It meant that a lot of people all had to come together in one room and the lecturer would speak at them for an hour or so. Those students would take notes and be given assignments, and that was it. There was no interactive element much of the time, and although plenty of students would have got on just fine with this method of learning, some would not.
Some people don’t learn well in this way. Some need more interaction. They need different study methods. They need, in other words, the kind of learning environment that an online BSW would give.
Then consider the other problems that can make a standard college an uncomfortable place to be. It will take time, effort, and money to get there, time that could be spent much more productively elsewhere (studying, for example, or working, or spending time with family and friends). For shy students, being in a room with lots of other people is anxiety-inducing, and it can put them off learning for life.
Any of these issues can be overcome if you study for your BSW online. You can choose the environment you work in, whether it’s your study at home, your living room, even at the kitchen table. Perhaps you like to study at your local coffee shop or on a park bench. Maybe you love learning very early in the morning before anyone else has woken up, or you should work late into the night because you are free of all the chores you had to do during the day.
There are many benefits to learning online, and all of them will help you to achieve more in your life because all of them will allow you to gain the qualifications you need to succeed.
The Convenience
We’ve talked about how comfortable online learning can be, but we should also mention the convenience factor, something that works alongside the level of comfort you feel. When you find your online BSW course more convenient for you, you will go on to achieve more because you’ll work harder and you’ll be content in the course you have chosen. If you were enrolled in a course that was particularly inconvenient and that required you to be online at specific times, for example, which could result in issues at work or with your family, you would be much less inclined to work harder. You might even quit the course altogether because it just didn’t fit with what you wanted. Clearly, you wouldn’t achieve more in this way.
The added element of convenience that such a course offers allows those who would otherwise not have been able to go back to school and learn about social work to achieve their ultimate goals in life to do so.
Greater Interaction
There are so many reasons why studying online for your BSW will help you to achieve more. One of them is the interaction you can have during your course. At a traditional university, there isn’t much chance for this kind of interaction. Instead, you will be learning in a large hall or room with many other people, and time will be limited. You might have questions, but you can’t ask them because everyone else wants their say, you run out of time and have to be elsewhere (or the lecturer does), or you just don’t enjoy speaking up in front of a crowd.
How can you achieve more if you are unable to drill down further into the subject when you need to? The answer is you can’t.
An online course will give you the chance to do this. You will be able to schedule one to one sessions with your tutor, enabling you to ask all the questions you want and need to. You will also be encouraged to work via email, which can sometimes be even easier since you will have a written record of the answers given to you. Plus emailing is much more convenient as it can be done at any time, again working around your other commitments.
Career Advancement
When you are studying online, you can do so not just to achieve more in your life and gain the qualifications you need to get the career you truly want. You can also study online for a degree that will help you advance in the career you already have. Since this can all be done while you are still at work, you can start putting your new knowledge into practice immediately, showing your employee that you are learning a lot and that you intend to succeed.
Ironically, when you are looking to advance your career, and you feel you might be better off searching for a different employer to give you the best chance of achieving everything you possibly can, it is your resume that might be the problem. If you took time off work to study, even if that studying was to advance your career, it can look bad.
So don’t do this. Study for an online BSW, and you won’t have to take time out of your career to do so. You can show potential employees just how dedicated you are and that you have continued working no matter what else you were doing. This can help you to stand out, and although it won’t guarantee a new job or career advancement, it certainly can’t damage your chances.
Get Ahead Of The Rest
Sometimes the issue with trying to achieve more in life is that other people can get in the way of your dreams. This is a problem in many different areas of life, but it’s one that can be minimized at least by attending online classes. Think of it this way; if you are at an online college to earn your BSW, it is unlikely you will ever miss a class. You won’t get stuck in traffic, sickness might put you behind, but you can catch up as if nothing had happened. Even a family emergency shouldn’t have a detrimental effect on your learning.
Your colleagues and those who are going to be applying for the same jobs as you and who are attending physical colleges will have to deal will find all kinds of issues that might mean they have to miss classes. Even something as simple as sleeping through an alarm could mean they miss a vital test or useful class. If you slept through an alarm, you wouldn’t miss anything; you could log on later and catch up easily.
You might not like the idea of ‘getting ahead’ of other people, but if you want to achieve more in your life, you may need to do just this. An online degree is an ideal way to do it, allowing you to have everything you ever wanted and not have to give up anything in your life if you don’t want to.
