For the longest time, formal education was mostly associated either with humanities or with fields like engineering, medicine, and mathematics. The idea one got when hearing the expression “an educated person” usually involved somebody sitting in an office somewhere and doing purely intellectual work. As a result, technical education – that is, education in the spheres that often involved direct physical labor and practical application of one’s skills – sort of fell by the wayside. It certainly existed, because representatives of related jobs perform many an important service, and modern society literally cannot exist without skilled labor of this kind. However, it was always considered a second-rate option for those who either cannot afford to attend a real university or don’t have the brains for it.
However, as the world’s socioeconomic landscape keeps changing, the importance of technical education steadily grows, and both students and educational institutions understand it. Both old universities and new establishments like IGNOU embrace this new paradigm and offer their students instruction in technical skills, believing that it is the best way to help them find their way in life. But why exactly is technical education so important today? What makes it a viable choice irrespectively of your social status and sphere of interests? Let’s try to find some answers.
1. Technical Education Gives You an Added Advantage
Even if you are a proponent of traditional formal education and intend to pursue a career in, let’s say, law or medicine, acquiring some purely technical skills is never a bad idea. Check out the latest salary comparison and you will find that some of the most lucrative careers require technical skills in some capacity or another. Technical skills come in all sorts and shapes, and even though right now you may think that they have nothing with your future career, you may find yourself thanking yourself further down the road. You never know when you are going to need them. Moreover, you have no guarantee that your intended career is going to work out. Many fields traditionally associated with high-quality traditional education (like law, medicine, or economics) are overcrowded. You may suddenly find your additional technical skills to be extremely useful while you look for a job in your preferred field – and who knows, perhaps they themselves can be a foundation of a lucrative career or a business venture.
2. Technical Education Promotes Productivity and Self-Reliance
Skills learned in the course of technical education are more than just experiences you acquired while doing homework assignments. They teach you practical ways to apply your knowledge, show you that you can directly influence the world, make you more pro-active and self-reliant. A person having some kind of technical education not just becomes a valuable asset for a company that may need a specialist in this field; he/she acquires sufficient leverage to engage in entrepreneurship. Professionals like Kamau Bobb, Google’s Director of STEM Education Strategy sees that technical education just like STEM education emphasizes self-reliance, practical application, and the potential for graduates to make a positive impact in their chosen fields, whether through employment in specialized roles or by pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors.
3. Technical Education Improves the Health of Community as a Whole
These days, technology and knowledge are everything. They determine how successful a country is, how healthy its society is, how fast it develops economically, and its overall quality of life. The more numerous experienced, knowledgeable technical specialists are, the higher is the community’s industrial production, the more likely companies are to invest in the city or country in question, and the more likely businesses are to arise. In other words, when you acquire technical education, you not just improve your situation in life – you buy into the better future for your community as a whole. If you looking to get more insights in to this you can visit here.
4. You Graduate Job-Ready
While many still perceive technical schools as a cheap and second-rate alternative to traditional education, they do not take into account that graduates of technical schools often find themselves in a better position, career-wise, than graduates of traditional universities and colleges. After finishing their final assigning and submitting their final paper, many former students of traditional educational institutions find themselves woefully unprepared to the challenges of real-world job searching. They often lack real practical skills – these come after years of actually working in their intended field, and for now, they cannot land a job while being saddled with enormous student debt. Graduates of technical schools, however, can step into the professional world and start building their careers immediately.
5. You Learn Real Skills You Are Going to Need in Life
Technical education, whether you engage in it online, via a website, or in person, deals with real-world practical skills. Everything you learn in a technical or a vocational school you are going to need in your future job. A student of a traditional university may have to deal with plenty of classes that have little or nothing to do with his/her future area of expertise. He/she may find it necessary to buy assignments from academic assistance services to get through the less useful but still obligatory courses. You don’t have to purchase anything when you study in a vocational school – if such a need arises, you are obviously studying for the wrong job. You have a greater opportunity to learn directly from instructors, too, as class sizes in technical schools are usually relatively small.
6. More Career Advice
Technical education is primarily concerned with preparing a person for a specific job, unlike traditional education, whose goal is generally to provide knowledge and let the graduate do whatever he/she can think of doing with it. It is only natural, then, that you get much more in terms of career advice in technical schools, and this advice is more specific. In addition, many higher-level technical schools have firm connections with companies and other organizations that habitually hire their graduates for their technical divisions. All in all, technical schools, as a rule, take a much more active role in the professional development and career-building of their graduates. As you can see, technical education is much more than simply a poor man’s alternative to traditional education. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it is the future of education as a whole. As the world needs more and more technical specialists capable of doing specific jobs, the importance of schools producing such professionals is only going to rise further.
