Are you an ambitious bloke who wants to further your career with as little pain as possible? Next year is right around the corner, so chances are that you’re thinking up some New Years resolutions to help you improve. There’s no better way than to get a few extra training courses under your belt.
These look great on your resume and they can be very attractive to prospective employers. Certificates help to show people that you know what you’re talking about. If you’re looking for an early holiday gift to give yourself, then check out these five courses. Any of them should give you an extra air of authority whether you’re a developer, administrator, or technician.
Amazon Web Services has been hiring for a while, but now countless smaller companies need people trained to work with the platform. The AWS certification process is relatively quick, especially if you have any past experience working with servers or databases. On-demand cloud computing deployment is based on the same principles you’re probably already using to code local resources.
These courses cover everything involved with designing and scaling AWS Cloud implementations based on the practices recommended by Amazon. One organisation claims that AWS certified solution architects can earn six-figure salaries, so this is becoming a competitive market segment. Taking classes early is the best way to stay ahead of your competition.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) theories are changing the way that many individual professionals do business, even though it has nothing to do with coding or marketing. NLP courses teach a set of skills that can help you recognize which communication skills matter most. If you’ve ever felt like your life is stuck in neutral, then this is the perfect type of course for you.
Learning how to rethink your paradigms and habits can make you a better communicator, which in turn can help you to achieve your goals more easily. Many students report that these classes have helped them boost their confidence and even helped to reduce stress by teaching them to recognize what messages really matter in life. Picking your battles isn’t always easy, but NLP training can help quite a bit.
Cocoa is quickly becoming a dinosaur, so anyone who wants to program for Apple’s growing ecosystem needs to learn Swift if they want to stay relevant as a developer. Colleges and employers are integrating this kind of training into their existing curriculum through Apple’s Everyone Can Code initiative. If you already know some type of Objective-C, then learning Swift is easy and fun. You might even be able to pick up most of what you need to know in a couple of days depending on your background.
Do you enjoy pushing send after every social message you send to promote your brand? No one does, which is why marketing automation has become such a major topic in the last few years. These courses teach all the basic skills you need to deploy your own automatic message scripts. Graduates often have more time to focus on their pitches as opposed to running a campaign.
For years, you’ve probably heard that you should be learning as much about Red Hat and Fedora as possible. Debian is now used by a large percentage of sites nationwide, and it’s the basis for the popular Ubuntu distro that’s become every bit as important on servers. Web developers and administrators can do themselves a favour by enrolling in a class that teaches the basics of apt-get package distribution and other needed skills that are going to be very much in-demand over the next year.
While it’s never too late to improve yourself, you’ll want to make sure you sign up ahead of New Year’s Eve. Plenty of like-minded people are going to be trying to get into these courses as well, so it’s important to apply for all the ones you want as soon as possible to avoid disappointment. Ambition is never a bad thing, so maybe you can even try to get a class or two finished up before the holidays are over.
