Education and training pathways worth considering

The conversation about education in the working world is still dominated by the three-year undergraduate degree. It is the default reference point, the thing other options are measured against. For a lot of people, at a lot of stages of life, it is no longer the most useful frame.

Apprenticeships, vocational qualifications, short professional courses, employer-funded training, online certifications and self-directed learning are not a fringe set of alternatives any more. They are a serious part of how skills are now built and recognised. The challenge is evaluating them honestly, because the marketing in this space is uneven.

Useful questions to ask of any training route: who recognises the qualification, what employers actually look for, what the realistic time and money commitment is, and what people who completed it five years ago are doing now. The last one is the most overlooked.

Be wary of any pathway whose strongest selling point is the marketing. Genuinely useful training tends to be specific about what it teaches, who teaches it and what it leads to. Vague promises are usually exactly what they sound like.

And take seriously the option of learning at work. Stretch projects, formal mentoring, secondments and the unglamorous business of being given a slightly harder job than you are ready for are, for many people, the most effective form of education available — and the cheapest.