Ways to Increase your Skillset After College

The time after college is a crucial point in a recent grads life where they gotta start finding a job. All recent graduate students have most likely faced that same predicament, and have most likely asked themselves, “How do I get a job without skills and experience? I need a job so I can get that skills and experience!” 

Well, here’s how! Here’s a few tips and bits of advice on how to increase your skillset after graduating college. 

1. Online Classes

Taking classes is kind of like jumping out of the fire, only to jump straight back into it. But it’s one of the best and most efficient ways to continue gaining skills after college, and some of the online classes even give you certificates once you’re done with the course. 

There’s a ton of great resources online to start taking online courses to expand your skills. Here’s a list of them: 

• Masterclass lets you pay for classes annually for $180, which gives you unlimited access to all their classes. Currently they don’t offer any certification.
• Unlike Masterclass, Coursera gives you verifiable, real certificates for specialization that you can use to spruce up your resume. There’s a fee if you enroll in the specialization, but if you can’t afford the fee, you can apply for financial aid!
• For Lynda, you can pay $19.99 a month if you get their annual plan. They offer courses in many things like programming, graphic designing, illustration, and many other things.
• Codecademy is especially for coding. They have a monthly plan for $19.99, but their basic interactive lessons and daily practice is free.
• Khan Academy is where you can learn and gain skills for free. There’s no pricing!
• Udacity’s online learning is mainly data science, computer science, and programming oriented. It’s mostly free, but there are exclusive Udacity degrees called Nanodegrees where you do need to pay $399 monthly.
• When you sign up for Skillshare, you have the option to choose from three monthly options. Skillshare also gives sponsorships to a ton of YouTubers, so you can snag a code from one of them.
• General Assembly offers both online and on-campus learning to expand your skills. They offer a variety of courses in design, data science, web development, digital marketing, and many, many others. It is a bit pricier, though; 24 hours after enrollment, you have to pay $250 upfront.
• Udemy’s pricing ranges from $50 to $100+. They also provide certificates of completion that you can share with your co-workers, and future employers. They have a ton of courses on development, finance, music, and many other course subjects.
• CreativeLIVE is also another online class website that has a ton of creative classes to show you how to draw, how to develop characters. They also provide classes in other subjects like music, photography, calligraphy, and other things too.

2. Internships

Getting an internship is a great way to gain skills. Indeed.com currently has a plethora of internship opportunities that vary from social media, content creation, cinematography, journalism, finance, and so many other career fields.

You can also take up internships during college, but who says you can’t keep doing internships? If you’re looking to expand your skills, internships are the way to go. 

It’s especially perfect right now, considering that many internships are remote, so you can stay inside while racking up your skillset. 

3. Attend Workshops

If you’re ever on LinkedIn, and you’re following big companies, sometimes they’ll put out free workshops for you to attend. Workshops are a great way to see what the industry you’re about to head into and what it’s like.

LinkedIn is a great website to see any workshops that big companies sometimes put out, too. 

Sometimes, these workshops even show you how to do a specific thing or how to get into the industry that you want to get a job in. They’re great! It’s a good alternative to physical meetups, but you could totally do those post-quarantine! 

4. Volunteer

Volunteering your time is another great way to expand on your skills, and to network as well! When you volunteer, you connect with a lot of people, which, in turn, allows for a ton of networking to be done. You’ll also be helping a lot of people by volunteering, so it’s a win-win situation for everyone!

You can also put any volunteering you’ve done on your resume, so it makes you look even better. It shows that you aren’t just all work and no play, and shows you do a lot of good stuff with your time.

Here’s some volunteering sites you can use post-quarantine: 

JustServe 

VolunteerMatch

*VolunteerMatch has remote and online volunteering opportunities!

AllForGood

DoSomething

GivePulse

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5. Podcasts

Listening to podcasts is another way to get your feet into the door of your preferred industry, and a pretty easy way to expand on your skills. This goes hand-in-hand with registering to workshops. 

There’s a ton of podcasts you can listen to on the iTunes Store, Audible, and even on YouTube. They’ll sometimes talk about their jobs and what they do. 

6. Books

Sometimes returning to the most basic principles of learning is one of the best ways to learn new skills.

Do you have a library in your town? They’re one of the best resources for learning new skills because you’ll be learning and reading from professionals who’ve written books about your preferred industry. The library also has computers that you can use if you don’t have a computer. 

Even if you don’t have a library, you have a ton of PDF’s, resources, and books online for you to read and learn from. If you don’t have a ton of money to spend on books, then ThriftBooks and Amazon are wonderful resources for you to check out used or cheap books so you can get your learning on!

Hopefully this helped you out, if you don’t really know how to get started with furthering your skills and experience. There’s plenty of other websites and resources that weren’t mentioned that can totally help you in your journey for more skills. It’s just a matter of finding the right one for you. 

How are you planning to build your skills? Comment below and let us know!