Insights and Perspectives

The Benefits Of The Alison Career Guide

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 18:57:00 GMT

By the Alison Editorial Team

When it comes to helping career seekers on the path to finding fulfilling and gainful employment, it can be challenging to map out exactly how upskilling in specific areas will result in a career. Job seekers often struggle to stay motivated if they can't see how a course in, say, supply chains, will translate into a warehouse manager job. Central to a workforce agency's role in upskilling individuals is helping them map out a practical journey towards their desired career.

Alison's Career Guide is a dynamic and multifaceted tool that does exactly that. The guide allows workforce agencies to help job seekers chart their journey towards successfully qualifying for, and attaining, their career of choice. A one-stop resource, it lays out hundreds of career paths along with the skills and qualifications required to achieve them.

The Career Guide helps take the guesswork out of upskilling by providing clear instructions on how to pursue a particular job. The Projected Career Map feature is as helpful for agencies as it is for job-seekers because it allows them to show their clients that there is a roadmap to success that they can follow. The Guide also provides a curated list of courses that will help them upskill appropriately. This offers goal-orientated learning for job-seekers and encourages engagement and commitment.

The holistic nature of the Career Guide, offering career information as well as training and education, is a game-changer in the world of online education as it provides job-seekers with a complete roadmap to achieving their professional ambitions.

The Career Guide can be used by workforce agencies in multiple ways, depending on their clients. For job seekers who know what career they want, but don't know how to get it, the guide offers everything they need to know about their chosen career. From courses related to their chosen career to courses teaching required skills, from Recommended Qualifications to suggested work experience, job seekers will find a trove of information that will help advance their prospects.

For job seekers who are unsure of what career they'd like to pursue, or even what sector they'd like to work in, the Career Guide can function as an open-ended encyclopedia with which they can explore a wide range of diverse career opportunities. Before upskilling in a specific field, a job-seeker needs to know what type of job they're pursuing. While many resources provide plenty of information on specific careers, locating a single resource that provides in-depth information on many career paths can be difficult.

The Alison Career Guide covers 16 diverse sectors, such as Information Technology and Health Sciences, and each career is outlined through a series of concise subsections. Users can learn about a career's typical job responsibilities, the standard work environment and what kind of salary they can expect. Particularly helpful for undecided job-seekers is the Similar Careers section, which shows users jobs similar to the one they're researching but to which they might be better suited.

The Career Guide is an intuitive resource designed to be navigated by both job-seekers and workforce agencies alike. Each career is assigned its appropriate Holland Codes and, like all other Alison tools and resources, can be leveraged as part of Alison Groups, which allows agencies to oversee and monitor the engagement and progress of their clients.

Alison.Com’s Self-Publishing Tool Brings New Opportunities For Upskilling And Reskilling

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 15:12:00 GMT

Discover a unique feature of Alison.com that provides a means for career continuity as well as an opportunity for a new path.

By the Alison.com Editorial Board

Knowledge Sharing Empowers Yourself And Others

Online courses are a universally accessible resource for jobseekers and life-long learners. Learning online is an alternate way to introduce people in need of reskilling to education and helps build the confidence of those who may not have formal learning experience. Equally, for those who have gone through the traditional education system and gained qualifications, once they find themselves back in the job market, online learning is one of the best tools out there for gaining new, in-demand skills or aiding a change in career direction.

However, taking online courses isn't the only way for jobseekers to benefit from online learning platforms. Some e-learning sites allow knowledge experts to freely publish their expertise. Alison’s Publishing Tool is free to use for all learners, opening up two possible career paths. By directing jobseekers towards not just taking online courses but making online courses, workforce agencies can send their clients down a unique career pathway that is interesting, rewarding, and lucrative.

Monetizing Your Knowledge

By using the Alison Publishing Tool to create courses based on their own experience and expertise, jobseekers are continuing to work in the sector in which they are already skilled. They can transform the knowledge they have garnered throughout their work-life into courses that will help others. For example, an accountant who can't find a job can teach online accounting courses, rather than retrain in an entirely new sector.

Self-publishing also allows jobseekers to monetize their existing knowledge and skillsets, while upskilling important technical and teaching skills—both of which are highly transferable. Creating online courses can also be a gratifying career, as publishers are partaking in the democratization of education by sharing knowledge with a global audience, many of whom are in emerging educational markets.

To become a self-publisher on Alison, learners must complete a series of courses to train them in the technical requirements and bring them up to speed on the best pedagogical practices. To learn more about what it is like to self-publish with Alison, you can read this interview with S. M. Waqas, an industrial engineer who has become one of Alison’s most successful self-publishers.

A Career As A Freelance Course Creator

Even if a jobseeker doesn't already have a body of professional knowledge and experience to draw on, a career in course publishing is still a possibility. Freelance Course Creators build courses on behalf of subject matter experts that are interested in sharing their expertise.

The opportunity to work from home (or from anywhere in the world) along with the freedom and flexibility to determine your own working hours has become an attractive perk for Course Creators. It's a freelance position that offers plenty of fantastic opportunities for advancement and promotion. Alison’s Course Creator program has seen many freelancers go onto full-time management roles within the Publishing Department. Read the success stories of Simon Furnivall and Abasido Umoh who have taken this career path on the Alison Blog.

Becoming a freelance Course Creator on Alison also offers the opportunity to work directly with subject-matter experts and provides access to some of the sharpest minds across a variety of fields. It is a position that facilitates continuous development through exposure to a wide range of subjects and offers constant opportunities to learn.

All Course Creators are guided through the Course Creator Training Program by Alison’s supervisors, who work with them to publish their first course. After undergoing the necessary training, Course Creators work closely with publishers and the Alison team to ensure courses are of the highest quality. Alison also hosts regular webinars presented by in-house experts. These sessions ensure that all self-publishers and Course Creators have access to the most cutting-edge theory and methodology behind producing top-quality courses, allowing them to maximize their earning potential.

Self-Publishing For Workforce Agencies

Alison's Publishing Tool also offers workforce agencies the opportunity to create personalized training courses that cater to their client’s specific needs. Agencies know their clients better than anyone, but sometimes it can be difficult to point them in the right direction for training if the resources simply aren't there. By utilizing the Publishing Tool, agencies can create the perfect upskilling material, specifically designed with the needs of their clients in mind.

The Publishing Tool produces courses that adhere to Alison's tried and tested learning format, designed by our pedagogical experts. These are easy to follow and encourage quality learning and engagement. With Alison.com, workforce agencies will never be stuck for training resources again. If the training resource isn’t available, they will help create it!

About Alison

Alison believes that free education, more than anything has the power to break through boundaries and transform lives. Alison is one of the world’s largest free learning platforms for education and skills training – and is dedicated to making it possible for anyone, to study anything, anywhere, at any time, for free online, at any subject level. Today, Alison offers over 3,000 free online courses across a broad range of topics, produced by various publishers, ranging from major educational institutions to individual subject matter experts sharing expertise gained from decades of industry experience. Today, with more than 20 million learners in 195 countries, Alison is changing how the world learns and up-skills.

Filling In The Gaps: How Workforce Agencies Are Using Alison To Fundamentally Change Skills-Based Training

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 16:54:00 GMT

By Dr. Tim Potenz

With more than 13 million users worldwide enrolled in thousands of free online courses, Alison.com has transformed into an industry-leading provider of online education and job skills training. On a global scale, their educational impact has earned them numerous awards from organizations and initiatives such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Economic Forum, and the World Innovation Summit for Education.

In 2007, Alison was launched by founder Mike Feerick, an early pioneer of the Massive Open Online Courseware (MOOC) movement. His vision is responsible for the success of more than 2 million graduates worldwide, with 175 thousand new learners signing up every month.

An Educational Cornerstone

In the United States, hundreds of workforce agency administrators have used Alison.com to develop suites of freely-accessible online courses, forming educational cornerstones key to federally-funded government programs.

When parents or guardians face periods of transition, sometimes due to job loss, programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), SNAP Employment and Training (SNAP E&T;) and the Florida-centric Welfare Transition Program (WTP) offer needed assistance to qualified participants. This form of help can include time-limited financial assistance for basic needs such as food, clothing, and housing, but also includes transitional services to help families become independent. A significant part of these transitory services include GED prep courses, job training and interview practice, vocational training, classes in basic English, and job retention services.

“In terms of workforce advantages, Alison.com is building inroads in several distinct areas,” says Dan Fitzgerald, a Corporate Workforce Trainer at Geographic Solutions. “It fills the training-related gaps for programs like SNAP E&T; and TANF, offering low-cost alternatives for program participants.

Impacting Training Completion Rates

For CareerSource, Florida’s statewide network of workforce development boards and career centers, program managers have been integrating Alison’s free learning resources into their workforce programs since 2009. Because Alison’s courses are self-paced and time flexible, registered learners can level up their skills anywhere, and at any time. This helps workforce agency administrators spend less resources on scheduling, structuring, and monitoring, and more time on their actual training. Devoting more attention to these critical areas has made a significant impact on training completion rates. And, with Alison’s data-rich user statistics, admins can immediately see how much time a job seeker has spent on training.

A newer feature in Alison’s arsenal is the Career Guide, which ushers job seekers towards the right courses, catered towards specific career paths. These courses are laid out on different skill levels, and learners are guided through each course appropriately. The time needed to structure training is therefore taken on by experts, which allows more job seekers to get the most out of their activity, helping them stick with the program.

Expanding Job Ready Initiatives

Looking towards 2020 and beyond, Alison plans to expand their Job-Ready initiatives to workforce-industry professionals striving to create their own suite of free online courses and certifications. You can hear more about essential free learning at the 2019 Workforce Technology Conference.

About the Author: Dr. Tim Potenz is the Editor at Alison.com, where he's responsible for the Careers section of the platform.