10 reasons for having an alternative skill or career

via icould by admin

About the author
Simon North is the Founder of Position Ignition, one of the UK's leading career consultancy companies which created the Career Ignition Club, a leading-edge online careers support and learning platform. Follow him @PosIgnition



Before you commit time, effort and money to developing new skills or pursuing alternative interests, you may be wondering what sort of options doing so would give you. No matter who you are, where you currently are in your life and career and what new things you're looking to try out, there are a number of reasons why you should step out of your comfort zone and learn something different.

1. Continuous learning is becoming more and more critical in modern working life for everybody, not just for the more educated and professional worker. It does not matter what part of the economy you are in, you have, during your working life, to improve your skills. Just think about how technology has transformed secretarial/administrative and managerial jobs over the last 20 years ago.
2. Regardless of why you need to build skills, doing so can give you firepower and energy.
3. Your working life is going to last around 50 years. This is a very, very long time and you want to give yourself a better chance of having an interesting and fulfilling career by constantly learning and trying new things.
4. It increases your value. If the building of skills is successful, they'll complement the skills you already have. A medical student who qualifies as a general practitioner and then spends years acquiring skills in various other specialisms increases their understanding of their general practitioner work. However, they can also provide additional services because they've obtained the know-how acquired. There are plenty of other examples in many other fields.
5. A specifically alternative skill is going to give you an edge over others who only have generic skills. You'll become someone who is able to operate in a particularly obscure niche. You could be the only person in a given talent pool who speaks a particular foreign language and if it's relevant to the field you're already working in, then it absolutely gives you potential to further your career.
6. And, as an extension of that, it gives your current employer something to think about. Your employer knows you and knows your capability and will be impressed by efforts to expand this capability.
7. Engaging in virtual learning can improve your ability to use technology. This is useful for you within the space of both your working life and your personal life. One of the things about the virtual learning movement is that it introduces us to all the different electronic tools, resources and processes that we have available to us now in so many ways. However, you use your new found understanding of electronics and gadgetry; you will be feeding your brain. It is also fun and convenient.
8. Anything you accomplish in life, any qualifications that you earn, will last forever. No one can ever take it away, whether it's a diploma or the fact you swam 25 km. When you set out to gain an alternative skill, it is never wasted and it is absolutely a part of who you go on to become.
9. Combining all of the skills that you have acquired through your current job, through other work and through extracurricular activities gives you more options in your current work and, more importantly, in your future employment. You will be working for a long time and it is not likely that you will have just one role or even one employer, so take a long-term view of how what you are doing in the short term will add value to your career.
10. Whoever your boss is and at whatever stage your career is at, if you gain new skills, you give your superior a terrific opportunity to use you differently. And so building skills can help you satisfy your need for new and interesting work and more fulfilling tasks.

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