Should You Earn An Online Master’s Degree?
Filed Under Master's Degree Online
You’ve got a good education, graduated from a top-notch degree program and made a great start on your career. You’re taking on more responsibility at work, and getting good reviews from your colleagues. You’ve even heard rumors about a possible promotion that will set you on the path to a management career. But suddenly nothing looks quite so rosy.
The day starts fine, when your boss offers to takes you to lunch. Over a nice meal, she heaps praise on you. You’re a great worker; your results are good; and even a couple of the senior executives have complimented your work. But that promotion isn’t going to you — instead, your colleague Rob is getting it. Why? Because Rob has a Master’s degree.
Where does that leave you? You like the company you work for, you’re good at the job, and you have colleagues you respect and like. (Except for Rob right now.) As it stands you have three choices:
- Leave immediately, and start fresh at another company.
- Stay with the company, even though there’s no chance of promotion.
- Return to college to earn your master’s degree.
Faced with this sort of bad news, it’s tempting to slam your hands down on the table and quit on the spot. After all, if these blind fools can’t see your value to their company, then you’ll just go and work for someone who can, darn it!
But there are two problems with that approach:
- Your boss was very clear that the company thinks that you’re a great worker — you just don’t have a graduate degree.
- You may have exactly the same problem at another company, plus you’ll have to start all over again in building your reputation and gaining the trust and respect of your colleagues.
Of course, you could simply stay where you are right now. But that’s not a long term solution … if there’s no opportunity for advancement in your current job you’ll quickly become frustrated and bitter. You’ve only just begun to move up the career ladder, so you can’t accept that your climb to the top is over before it’s begun … can you?
Even in the short time you’ve worked at your company, you’ve already spotted a couple of time- servers. You know the type: Too many trips to the coffee machine; first out the door at the end of the day; and daily sad-looking sack lunches with the same few guys. They make themselves useful enough that they still have jobs … but no one looks their way when an exciting new project is being launched. Nope, that’s not you.
The only real choice for you is to head back to university for a graduate degree. Whether you stay at your current company or not, earning another degree will be a valuable resource as you develop your career. More and more employers are hiring employees with graduate degrees, and so looking for a job without a Master’s degree may be a challenge in the future. So that’s settled …. except …
How are you going to do that? Unless you’re independently wealthy (and if that’s the case, why are you working at all?) you probably need to keep your paycheck so quitting to return to school full-time would be hard. And since your current job involves a lot of travel, committing to a part-time night-school schedule may not be possible.
The best solution is to earn an online college degree. Since classes are usually streamed via the Internet you can watch lectures at a time that’s convenient for you, and classroom discussion is replaced by bulletin boards, chat rooms, and email. Even the travel demanded by your job shouldn’t be a barrier; with a laptop and a wireless connection you can progress with your master’s degree program wherever you want.
There are many excellent schools which offer online degrees in a wide range of subjects. Whether you’d be better studying information technology, human resources, or business administration, you’re sure to find a graduate program that will suit you. One word of warning: Be sure that you focus on colleges that are accredited. The phrase that you should look for is “regional accreditation” since that will guarantee that the degree you earn will be accepted by all future employers.
Your first task is to research some of the distance learning options available, and this site can be helpful to you as you look for the best program to earn your master’s degree online.
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