Some Resources to Level You up While You Are at Home

I am writing this article as of the middle of May 2020 where some states are closed in a lockdown of non-essential businesses, and other states are opening up, but if you find yourself at home, either alone or with family, I hope that you have taken some time to level yourself up while you have had the opportunity. I am going to write about some resources that are out there.

First of all if you have filed for unemployment insurance, your local Department of Unemployment office may have training programs that are grant funded that you might be eligible for if you want to change your profession. This may involve contacting your nearest local office and chatting with a counselor who can explain what trainings they have available. At this time it would mean talking over the telephone and at some future time meeting in person. If you are eligible by being either low-income or dislocated from an existing job, and meet their other eligibility requirements they would make an individualized career plan for you that might even include funding for training and education programs. Another program that they are currently open for enrollment for is healthcare training, but the actual training will not start until the summer. Your local Unemployment office also offers job search options if you are not changing career.

Another source of easily accessible trainings at a very low cost is Groupon.com. I am not affiliated with this website at all, and do not get any sort of commission for promoting it, but I was able to take a training course that usually sells for about $399 at a reduced price of $19, so I am very enthusiastic about this site. They are currently offering some on-line education courses at an unbelievably low price, which may not be the case when you read this article, but they always have inexpensive on-line courses available. The ones that I am viewing now are a Master's of Business course from the European Business School of Barcelona that usually costs $7200 is being offered by Groupon at $249. The coursework is in English, and the school claims to have a good international reputation. Obviously, you will need to have a bachelor degree to take advantage of this offer. Another inexpensive course is an Information Technology Training from ITU which promises to qualify you as a computer technician, a network technician, and a security technician all for the low price of $89 reduced from $2,695! You can't lose at that price, although I notice that most companies that hire IT staff want them to have experience which usually comes from doing an internship while at a physical university.

Anyway, there are many other inexpensive courses that groupon.com offers which vary from a course in bartending to teaching English overseas. It is well worth checking out all of the deals that they offer in a wide range of fields which are not just educational but also recreational.

If you want to take learning Information Technology (IT) to a higher, more complex level than ITU, Coursera is an on-line site that offers courses taught by Google in Information Technology. These are course modules that take about six to eight months to complete and when I last looked they cost $50 a month, which might have gone up at the time of writing. It might be worthwhile to research the Coursera site and see what else they have to offer. There are many on-line universities offering courses but they can get to be very expensive. An inexpensive site for taking what amounts to short workshops in skills that improve your abilities within your chosen field, is Udemy. So if you have a degree for example in psychology, you can take a workshop in something related like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. If you don't have a degree you can still level yourself up by taking a short inexpensive course in something interesting but not professional like developing your psychic abilities or singing.

Finally, while we are at home YouTube tutorials offer us dozens of means of increasing our skills and abilities. Restaurants may be closed but YouTube offers us an infinite number of cooking tutorials from bread making to Indian curries, ice cream to pasta. If you are someone not used to cooking these tutorials will take you step by step through the process of making anything that you can think of. There are tutorials on everything on YouTube. Perhaps now would be a good time to work on learning a foreign language. There are YouTube videos that can help you to learn a language while you sleep. How about learning to play a musical instrument? Is there a craft that you might like to learn how to do, or gardening? It's all on YouTube. Most of the resources that I have mentioned may change over time but YouTube for example will always have thousands of tutorials, and if you are an expert in something yourself and you could make a tutorial video about something that you do, you could earn some income by creating a YouTube channel.

The knack with YouTube is that if you can get thousands of people to watch your videos then you can apply to have advertisements added to your videos and then you can make a small income on how many views your videos get. Someone called Pewdie Pie became a millionaire on making YouTube videos which appealed to younger people. I have never watched his videos, but some really stupid ideas have made fortunes for people because they drew the attention of thousands of teens. When i was teaching youth they introduced me to someone called "Miranda Sings". She is a really pretty young woman who makes herself look hideous with badly applied bright red lipstick, and she sings really badly! I suppose the humor might be that we all know someone delusional who thinks that they look pretty with too much make-up and who thinks that they can sing when they cannot! I do not know if she is making a lot of money on YouTube but she does comedy tours and she is very popular. So there you are! If you can think of a great gimmick for a YouTube channel you could make a lot of money on YouTube.