Well Done! As you’re looking at this you’ve doubtless been pondering on re-training to work in a different industry - so you’ve already done more than most. Only one in ten of us are satisfied with our careers, but most complain but just stay there. You could join a select group who actually do something about it.

With regard to individual courses, discuss your thoughts with an industry expert who will give you advice on the right type of training for you. A person who will get an understanding of your personality, and find out what types of work suit you:

* Is working with other people your thing? Perhaps you like being a team player? Perhaps you prefer not to be disturbed and enjoy responsibilities that you can complete alone?

* What thoughts are fundamentally important regarding the industry you hope to work in?

* Should this be the only time you will need more qualifications?

* Do you feel uncomfortable about the possibility of finding new employment, and staying employable right up to retirement?

A predominant industry in this country to meet the above criteria is the IT industry. There’s a need for more qualified people in IT, just check out any jobsite and there’ll be a long list. Don’t let people tell you it’s all techie people gazing towards theirscreens all day - there are loads more jobs than that. Large numbers of the people in the computer industry are just like the rest of us, but they enjoy their work and get well paid.

How can we make the right choice then? With so much reward available, we’ll need to know where to look - and of course, what to actually be looking for.

It’s important to understand: a training course or the accreditation isn’t what this is about; the career that you want to end up in is. A lot of colleges seem to over-emphasise the course or the qualification. It’s quite usual, for example, to get a great deal of enjoyment from a year of study but end up spending 10 or 20 years in a job you hate, entirely because you stumbled into it without the correct research at the outset.

Spend some time thinking about what you want to earn and what level of ambition fits you. This will influence which particular exams will be required and how much effort you’ll have to give in return. As a precursor to beginning a learning program, it makes sense to talk through specific career requirements with an experienced professional, in order to be sure the retraining programme covers all the bases.

Ensure all your exams are commercially valid and current - forget courses that lead to in-house certificates. The main industry leaders such as Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA or Adobe each have globally recognised skills courses. These heavyweights will give some sparkle to your CV.

We need to make this very clear: Always get full 24×7 professional support from mentors and instructors. You’ll severely regret it if you don’t follow this rule rigidly. Never buy training that only supports students via a message system after 6-9pm in the evening and during weekends. Companies will give you every excuse in the book why you don’t need this. The simple fact of the matter is - you want support at the appropriate time - not when it suits them.

The best training colleges tend to use a web-based round-the-clock package involving many support centres from around the world. You get an easy to use interface that switches seamlessly to the best choice of centres no matter what time of day it is: Support when you need it. Don’t accept second best where support is concerned. Many trainees that throw in the towel, would have had a different experience if they’d got the right support package in the first place.

Students who consider this area of study often have a very practical outlook on work, and don’t always take well to classrooms, and struggling through thick study-volumes. If this is putting you off studying, try the newer style of interactive study, with on-screen demonstrations and labs. Many years of research has constantly verified that getting into our studies physically, is much more conducive to long-term memory.

Courses are now available via DVD-ROM discs, so everything is learned directly from your own PC. Utilising the latest video technology, you can watch instructors demonstrating how something is done, with some practice time to follow - in an interactive lab. Make sure to obtain a look at some courseware examples from your training provider. You should ask for instructor videos, demonstrations, slide-shows and fully interactive skills-lab’s.

Purely on-line training should be avoided. You want physical CD/DVD ROM course materials where possible, as you need to be able to use them whenever it’s convenient for you - ISP quality varies, so you don’t want to be totally reliant on a good broadband connection all the time.

It’s quite a normal occurrence for students not to check on a vitally important element - the way their training provider segments the courseware sections, and into what particular chunks. Many companies enrol you into some sort of program spread over 1-3 years, and courier the materials in pieces as you complete each section or exam. On the surface this seems reasonable - until you consider the following: What if you find the order insisted on by the company won’t suit you. It may be difficult to get through each and every section at the speed required?

For the perfect solution, you’d get ALL the training materials right at the beginning - enabling you to have them all to come back to at any time in the future - as and when you want. Variations can then be made to the order that you complete each objective where a more intuitive path can be found.

Charging for exams with the course fee then including an exam guarantee is common for a good many training companies. Consider the facts:

They’ve allowed costings for it by some means. You can be assured it’s not a freebie - it’s simply been shoe-horned into the price as a whole. If you want to qualify first ‘go’, evidence suggests you must fund each exam as you take it, prioritise it appropriately and apply yourself as required.

Find the best exam deal or offer available when you’re ready, and keep hold of your own money. In addition, it’s then your choice where to do your exams - so you can choose somewhere closer to home. Why tie up your cash (or borrow more than you need) for examinations when you don’t need to? A great deal of money is made by companies charging all their exam fees up-front - and then hoping that you won’t take them all. The majority of companies will insist on pre-tests and hold you back from re-takes until you have proved to them you have a good chance of passing - which makes an ‘Exam Guarantee’ frankly useless.

Average exam fees were approximately 112 pounds twelve months or so ago via VUE or Pro-metric centres in the UK. So don’t be talked into shelling out hundreds or thousands of pounds more to get ‘Exam Guarantees’, when common sense dictates that what’s really needed is study, commitment and preparing with good quality mock and practice exams.

The world of information technology is one of the more thrilling and changing industries that you could be a part of. Being up close and personal with technology puts you at the fore-front of developments shaping life over the next few decades. We’re only just starting to get a feel for how technology will define our world. Computers and the Internet will massively change the way we see and interrelate with the rest of the world over the years to come.

If earning a good living is way up on your list of priorities, then you will welcome the news that the average salary of a typical IT worker is a lot greater than salaries in other market sectors. There is a significant national demand for trained and qualified IT technicians. It follows that with the constant growth in the marketplace, it looks like this will be the case for the significant future.