Courses are very useful to explore different subject areas and get any untapped opportunities in the field. There might be numerous reasons to pursue a course. Each one of us comes across many courses online related to our subject of interest. Doing a course might be an easy thing, but pursuing the right course that helps you to bring positive change is more important. Anyhow, we have to channelise our thoughts to reach a decision about which course to pursue. There are 5 ways to decide how to choose the right course:
1. Identify The End Goal
The primary and foremost requirement to choose a course is to identify your end goal. One needs to have a clear picture of what he/she wants to achieve by doing the course. It contains your basic reason which motivated you to pursue a particular course. You need to ask some basic questions to yourself to get a proper answer:
- Are you going to get any qualifications for this course?
- Are you planning to get a new skill?
- Are you looking to use the skill to get a promotion?
- Do you want to have the course as a side hustle and create income?
2. Analysis
Once you have the answers for any of the above, you can start to prepare groundwork. It is very important to analyse the course compared with your capabilities. A SWOT analysis is ideal to check all the parameters for deciding about a course.
- Strength– Identify the strengths which can help you to understand and learn about the proceedings of the course.
- Weakness– Check for the weaknesses which you can address by completing the course and overcome it.
- Opportunities – What are the opportunities you may unlock by learning the course and if it helps you?
- Threat – Whether there are any hurdles in taking up the course such as the course duration or course fee.
3. Research
After analysing your capabilities, based on the answers you get, head towards the research. For any course, no matter how reputed organisation or university is offering it, a thorough research is very much needed. Do your own research on the alumni who are in the panel of members providing the course. You can know about their affiliations and associations which may help you gain an opinion. Alternatively, you can contact the people who have already pursued or are pursuing the course.
4. Course Detail
Once you are clear about the course, knowing about basic details of the course is obvious to know. Details such as duration of the course, content of the course and most importantly course fee.
5. Post-Course Opportunities
The ultimate step to understand is how a course can create opportunities for you at the end. The final step answers your initial questions of your end-goal and helps you to make a better decision.
Once you’re through all the 5 steps in choosing the right course, you can come to a complete idea. Whichever course you are taking up, be it small or big, the above methodology helps you to choose the right course suitable for you.