British students taking career choices too soon, says SkillsTrain

UK (SANEPR.com) August 19, 2008 -- As British students await their GCSE’s, AS and A level results, top vocational home study college, SkillsTrain, says students are taking their life time career decisions at the worst possible time of their lives.

The college claims that students are often under pressure, at a time when a career still seems a far off reality, when they’re frequently too young and have little or no experience of life beyond education.

SkillsTrain College principal, Myra Smallman, said, “At 16 and 18 years old students are greatly influenced by their peers, their friends, their teachers and perhaps worse still, by their parents. As this year’s students receive their exam results they need to think very carefully about their chosen career paths.

Admittedly most of us no longer find a `career for life’, but committing to a career too young leads many needing to re-think university and college choices within just a few years, either dropping out or changing courses.”

SkillsTrain enrols home study students of all ages from 16 to 80, many of whom have entered the jobs market with the `wrong’ training or University skills. Once they are in the workplace they find they need to re-train in specific vocational skills, such as book-keeping, or Microsoft Office or one of the many technical and computing disciplines.

Myra Smallman continued, “Parents are often to blame, because the only experience they have is their own career paths and their own aspirations. But encouraging an IT enthusiast who spends every waking hour on the internet to study law or geography, isn’t going to work, whereas he’d probably thrive in a computing environment or as a web designer.

We have many students studying for our home study courses while continuing with jobs that they weren’t happy in, but at least on a SkillsTrain course they can make that choice by studying around their work commitments, rather than becoming perpetual college students.”

The company says that Internet security and web design are two of the most popular vocational courses, with book-keeping and Microsoft office skills also attracting a large number of career change students, as well as those simply wanting to demonstrate their ability to achieve a qualification.

For further information about SkillsTrain courses call 0800 052 3965 or visit www.skillstrainuk.com

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Press contact: Mary Stuart-Miller, 01403 738844