I decided several months ago to begin a new career. After thirty years of teaching employees, I wanted to share my experiences with others. There are many different skills that are developed when owning your own business; personnel management, marketing, inventory control, to name a few. Learning these skills from someone with real world experience should be better than reading text books.
As I have found, and rightfully so, even with real world experience, academic credentials are important. For me to teach at the Community College level, I will need to complete my Bachelors degree and begin work on a Masters. Generally a Masters Degree is required to teach at that level, but there has been some flexibility shown for those that are experienced in the subject matter and occasionally instructors are hired while a Masters Degree is being pursued. I am very fortunate that I will be teaching a few continuing education workshops to begin my academic teaching experience while pursuing my degrees.
The process for an adult to complete a degree was similar at all the colleges. After completing the admission process, an evaluation of past college work was conducted and I was given a good idea as to the course work I needed to complete. That’s when the similarities ended.
While all schools required a mix of basic learning courses to fulfill their core requirements, no two programs were the same. This eliminated the option of postponing the decision of choosing a program until after core completion. I also found that all schools were not aggressive in pursuing new students. This cavalier attitude is not tolerated in business so I was surprised when I found it in Education. Colleges of course are no more than businesses selling knowledge . While one college Program Director was very active and helped me understand the process, others missed appointments or didn’t return phone calls. I would have liked to make my school selection decision on merit, I feel that the actions of the Program Directors have made the decision for me. I guess I’ll let you know in 15-18 months how their decision turned out.
What do you think?
