Accelerating your career
WHILE many people choose to pursue their postgraduate courses right after completing their undergraduate studies, Jobstreet Education general manager Simran Kaur advises otherwise.
“It is wiser to work for a while before pursuing further education. By gaining a bit of experience you can understand which field of work or industry interests you before you pursue a specialisation in that field,” she says.
Aside from finding one’s niche area of expertise, there are other reasons more and more working adults, including professionals with busy careers, choose to pursue further study.
One reason someone may do so is to diversify his portfolio, meaning to pursue a field of specialisation that is completely different than his main area of expertise. For example, it is common for information technology (IT) professionals to pursue business management courses as there is a high demand for such professionals within the IT industry.
Another reason many working professionals are choosing to go back to school is to stay relevant. The way business is conducted is changing rapidly thanks to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with technology becoming an integral part of daily lives.
The skills and experiences of people who have been working for a decade or more are slowly becoming obsolete. To continue on their respective career paths, such people need to update themselves. What better way than to pursue further study?
Some professionals choose to go back to school to enhance their skills in their present work area. For example, specialising in auditing can allow an accountant who feels stagnant in his position to get that muchneeded push into advancement.
Regardless of the reason, the decision to return to student life after being away from it is anything but easy. Although further education can have a lasting positive impact on your career as well as your life, the road is bumpy and comes with its own set of challenges.
Hurdles along the way
The biggest fears of working professionals wishing to pursue further education are time management and course workload, especially if they intend to maintain their monthly income.
“Managing time was my main concern as I work in the IT support field. I am on support call 24/7 and work on weekends when required,” says Komathi Shumugum, a computer engineering graduate who has
been an application analyst support for nine years in a private organisation. She decided to pursue her master’s degree in business management part-time while still working full-time.
“I was unsure as to how I would cope and if my work and studies would negatively affect each other.”
Her fears, as it turned out, were not unfounded. She shares, “Too many assignment submissions with tight deadlines along with my heavy workload were killing me. It was too much for me to take at one point and I felt like giving up. I regretted going back to studies.”
However, she made it a point to overcome this barrier, making sacrifices such as cutting down on leisure activities so that she had more time to handle both work and her studies.
Adapting to change
For Mohd Firdaus Ibrahim, a parent and manager at a government organisation, going back to studying while still working meant balancing three things at once: work, studies and family.
He too was worried about the aspect of time in his busy schedule, saying, “I was worried that I will not able to catch up with the course materials given and will not have enough time to prepare for examinations.”
Moreover, he had to worry about geographic location because he was staying in Kuantan while studying in Kuala Lumpur.
“Every alternate weekend, I needed to travel from Kuantan to KL. While the learning methodology was compact and short, the assignments had tight deadlines that were to be completed within a week or a months’ time.”
Nonetheless, he found a way to work things out by staying back after classes to complete his assignments and would do the research for group assignments after working hours to ensure his coursework was up to par.
After working for 10 years as an IT professional in Bangladesh, Mohammed Masba Uddin Khandaker wanted to pursue a Master of Philosophy in computer science. This decision was not an easy one as it meant leaving his job and finishing the course full-time in Malaysia.
He admits his greatest concern was not so much time management but coping with the course material, especially after being away from studies for so long.
It is only natural that going back to studying after years in the workforce will bring about unexpected challenges, as Komathi shares, “This may sound silly, but among the challenges I faced was writing by hand. Working as an IT professional has me dealing with everything digitally and it had been years since I took pen to paper to write at length, so when I started my course, it was difficult for me to take notes in classes. It was even worse during exams because I needed to write long essays.”
Knowledge is never a waste
Both Komathi and Firdaus have successfully completed their courses and while Komathi is still waiting for an opportunity to use her newly acquired management skills, Firdaus has already been promoted to lead a department within a company.
“I gained valuable management skills from the course. It requires an entirely different skill to be among middle and top management than it does to be a subordinate. One valuable lesson I learnt that helps me in my current position is that sometimes, decisions are influenced by emotions, and as managers we must know
It is wiser to work for a while before pursuing further education. By gaining a bit of experience you can understand which field of work or industry interests you before you pursue a specialisation in that field.
how to differentiate between decisions based on emotions and those based on evidence. Additionally, I learnt about entrepreneurship in management, which I now use for strategic and financial planning within my current job responsibilities,” says Firdaus.
Firdaus and Komathi unanimously agree that pursuing further education has been worth all the challenges they have faced and neither of them regret their decision. That said, they say they could not have completed their pursuit if they did not have enough support from family, coursemates and colleagues.
The takeaway from their experiences is that if they had listened to their fears or gave up when they faced challenges, they would not be where they are now.
Just go for it
Firdaus believes that learning must be continuous and knowledge upgraded to stay relevant in this rapidly changing era. For a fulfilling career, both education and experience is important, and one cannot be replaced by the other.