Today, it feels like there are almost too many ways to educate yourself. Between online courses, informal self-education, in-person instruction and traditional college curriculums, there’s no shortage of ways to gain knowledge in key fields.

Among other options, self-paced education is an excellent way to accelerate your growth in key skill areas. Self-paced education can help you grow your career, find new opportunities and future-proof your job and your income.

If you’re looking for a path to a six-figure career, but you need to learn the skills that today’s employers are looking for, self-paced education can help. In weeks, self-paced education can develop your skills in leading fields — including information technology, cybersecurity and machine learning — to help you level up your career.

What is self-paced education?

Traditional education has a serious problem. It’s designed to benefit everyone — educators, school faculty, investors — except students. Conventional education assumes that a uniform approach will work for all students. Quite obviously, this isn’t the case.

Self-paced education lets students personalize their learning according to their unique needs. It allows students to complete their courses at a speed that’s comfortable for them. As a student participating in self-paced education, you decide how much time you need before you fully understand each lesson.

In other words, self-paced education puts students in control of their rapidly blooming careers.

Think of self-paced education as a series that you can binge-watch on a Saturday. Or, you can finish an episode and rewatch it the next weekend to better understand which particular house has betrayed the king this time around.

6 ways self-paced learning can improve your career

Self-paced learning benefits students in several key areas, enabling global learners at all skill levels to make the most of dynamic education opportunities.

1. Self-paced learning is flexible

In self-paced education, students  learn at a speed that’s most convenient for them. Unlike traditional courses, you don’t have to be physically present in a classroom. You also don’t need to join a webinar at a predetermined time. It’s your course: you make the schedule, you make the rules..

Perhaps more importantly, you can choose to learn whenever you have the most energy. If you need to prepare for a presentation at your full-time job, or you simply need a little more sleep, don't worry; self-paced education is still there when you have the time.

Didn’t understand a concept? You can return to it later. Can’t remember a particular term? You can relearn it whenever you have the time. Pretty soon, you’ll develop your own pace, which will help you learn better and retain more of the critical information you’ll need to reach success.

2. Self-paced learning supports content in multiple forms

Gone are the days when you needed in-person education for certain subjects or topics.

No matter the topic you have in mind, there’s likely a self-paced education course on it.

Whether you’re interested in financial planning, gender studies or digital marketing, you’ll find a course where you can learn at your convenience.

Self-paced education is great for learners who want to pick up skills in industries that are relevant today. For example, you could pick skills in trending fields like cybersecurity or IT.

3. Self-paced learning is cost-effective

Gas, housing, groceries — prices are up across the board. It feels like the only thing not going up is your per-year salary. Even if your pay does increase, it may not be enough to catch you up with the Usain Bolt-level speed of overall price elevation.

Here’s the good news: self-paced online education is nowhere near as costly as in-person education, even though self-paced learning contributes to the same outcomes.

When you learn remotely, you don’t have to pay for the venue, materials, building utilities or any other facet of collegiate education. You pay a fraction  of what you would otherwise pay to learn from a college. Costs are saved and students can complete multiple courses without enduring financial burdens.

Since self-paced education is cost-effective, you can, if you choose to, study multiple courses in the same area. This will add serious weight to your LinkedIn profile. 

4. Self-paced learning helps you focus

Each one of us is at our best at different parts of the day. Some can focus well in the morning, while others have no problem staying up late at night. With any traditional course, you would be forced to focus and learn on someone else’s schedule.

That’s like someone else filling your plate at a buffet.

Learning when you’re at your best is certainly a superior option. Self-paced education is different because the emphasis is on the ‘self’ part. Once you understand your energy trends and the workload in your office, you can set aside time every day or every week for self-paced online education.

5. Self-paced learning makes feedback easy

Imagine a company town hall where your CEO asks if the audience has any questions. You may have a question, but you also know that your question is likely to be lost among a sea of other questions from employees trying to impress management. Giving feedback and asking questions in a conventional classroom is pretty similar to that. It gets crowded.

Self-paced education offers a better solution.

In self-paced online education, there are different ways for you to give feedback. You can visit a virtual discussion forum and voice your opinion, raise a question or provide other feedback. Then, others can respond and continue the dialogue. Importantly, instructors can also see and provide feedback, which helps them further fine-tune content.

6. Self-paced learning is succinct

Remember your textbooks from college? Neither do we. Here’s what we do remember: they were long, boring and uninventive. Even if you had the faintest of interests in a subject, the textbooks would have made sure that you began to hate the content after chapter two.

Self-paced online education is designed for digital use. Instructors know how difficult it is to focus on something if it doesn’t interest you. That’s why they’ve prepared modules to be succinct, engaging and informative from day one.

The digital-friendly format makes it easy for you to study with more flexibility. Catch a lesson while commuting or catch up on a module during a lunch break.

So, how do you use all these advantages to improve your career?

First, register for a self-paced education course from Pace, a modern education experience that prepares students around the world for rewarding, six-figure careers. Pace makes learning flexible, convenient and student-friendly. Contact us today to discover just how effective self-paced education can be.