If you have lost your job and you are having trouble finding a new one it could be that you are lacking in the skills department. Either your old skills have gotten rusty or you need new skills. But acquiring skills can take money and time. If you have been out of work for months, you may be fresh out of both. Fortunately the internet provides a wealth of skills training for free-if you know how to find it.
One of the first things you can do is Google terms like “free online tutorial” or “free online training.” Then go through the first 10 hyperlinks until you find some courses to your liking.
As a for instance, if you want to improve your general skills and knowledge or to enhance your professional development you might try the following websites
http://www.khake.com/page67.html
http://www.wikieducator.org/Content
A word of caution is in order here. The sites are like hyperlink farms. They cover so many different subjects you could get lost trying to figure out what to look at first. If you know what you want before you try them that will probably work out best. For instance, if you need to brush up on your international finance, then one of those two links could help.
Most of the office jobs you will try to get require that you know Microsoft Office. If you are trying to gets a new job in a new field then having a little expertise on how Microsoft Office products are used in that field can definitely provide a leg up. For instance, almost anyone who wants a management job in any Microsoft shop would benefit from learning Microsoft Project before showing up for the interview.
While there are certainly other websites, a representative sample of MS Office online training sites is listed below. Preference was given to free sites and sites which not badger the visitor with popup ads.
Microsoft Project
http://www.profsr.com/msproject/msproj01.htm
Excel
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/default.aspx
http://www.baycongroup.com/el0.htm
Word
http://www.baycongroup.com/wlesson0.htm
Powerpoint
http://www.actden.com/PP/
MS Access
http://www.baycongroup.com/access2007/index.html
All MS Office products
http://hubpages.com/hub/free-online-job-skills-training
There are two circumstances wherein you might need more advanced training. One is that you have an existing job but you hear high tech is where all the money is. The other is that you are already in a high tech field and you need either to sharpen you existing skills or gain some new ones. It’s easy to find places that charge money for their services but at present we want to stick with what you can get for free.
One of the best free sites I have ever come across is W3Schools. Almost any internet base scripting or programming language can be studied here. Especially anything that will run on an Internet Explorer browser. If you choose to become a web programmer this site will give you an idea of the number of different subjects you need to be conversant with. You don’t need to be an expert in all of them but you do need to know things like “Java” and “JavaScript” are not the same thing. For instance, I know JavaScript and am ready to produce a sample anywhere, anytime. As far as Java is concerned, well, I can scratch my head in a convincing fashion…
http://www.w3schools.com/
Another site, www.BrainBench.com has a lot of pay features associated with it but it also has some free test and test preparation materials that can help you see if you are ready for that tech interview. To get to the free stuff, once you register for the site, go to the Test Center and View All Free tests
If you do decide to get into IT then one of the languages you might consider starting with is JavaScript. I have already started an argument with every one of the IT people who just read that but I think I will stick with it anyway. You don’t need to buy any special software or to use any special equipment to write JavaScript code. You don’t even need to be on the internet to make it run. It runs on both Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can keep things pretty simple and get a fair amount of work using JavaScript and the far simpler presentation language HTML. If you want to get to the harder stuff and make more money, JavaScript has growth opportunities in directions such as AJAX. Given the number of sites that give out working JavaScript code for free, as long as you understand what the code does, you wouldn’t even have to write your own a lot of the time. Just adapt someone else’s. Start your training the W3Schools site and move on from there.
The standard job interviewing practices apply. Study the company website before you go and be knowledgeable enough about what the company does to ask at least one intelligent question about their products and services.
