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The perfect time to improve your employability skills

• January 14, 2021

Now that we again face weeks of lockdown and being stuck at home, this is the perfect opportunity to capitalise on this free time to improve valuable skills to succeed in any workplace. In the modern age, it has never been easier to self-develop skills from the comfort of your own home, and there are many free resources to use.

Online resources available

LinkedIn Learning has thousands of free and paid courses that range from focusing on improving your productivity, digital marketing, excel to coding skills. These qualities come highly regarded in the workplace and the initiative demonstrated to develop them independently will be viewed extremely positively by any potential employer, even if the skills are not directly related to your profession.

The London School of Economics offers more specialised courses developing skills and in-depth knowledge of focused areas such as negotiation and data analysis. These modules run over the course of several weeks but can be done at your own pace and in your own time, starting from just 6 hours a week necessary. The courses look particularly impressive coming from a highly prestigious and respected institution, vastly improving your employability making you significantly more competitive in an already cutthroat market.

Volunteering

In addition to industry skills, of late there is an abundance of volunteering opportunities that are just an impactful on your CV. For example becoming a volunteer vaccinator at St John Ambulance is the perfect way to demonstrate community responsibility and play an essential part in thousands of lives. Requiring only 16 hours a month commitment there are few better ways to use your time.

Many more volunteering opportunities can be found at Prospects that provide information of varied schemes and organisations that only survive thanks to the goodwill of volunteers. This demonstrates and develops your communication and team-work skills that are, of course, viewed favourably by employers.

Languages

The UK leads the way in learning foreign languages online with UK based users on the free app Duolingo rocketing by 132% in 2020. As well as being enjoyable, the ability to speak, read or write foreign languages adds an extra edge to your CV, it has also been shown to improve memory and decision making skills. The benefits of which therefore speak for themselves in how it beneficial it is to any worker and why it is so coveted by potential employers.

It is particularly important during this difficult time to utilise and organise your time at home responsibly, so looking at even one of these sources will be immeasurably beneficial to your career prospects and will embolden your employability, critically needed with many employers struggling in this environment.

If you are looking for employment, or are an employer seeking to hire, send us an email at recruitment@thegraduateproject.co.uk or give us a call at 02070434629, it is our absolute pleasure to be of any help.

Tyler Cairns