RPL: Being Unqualified Can Stop Career Opportunities
RPL (Recognition of Prior Learning) can be a vital tool opening career doors when you don’t have formal qualifications.
I read an article recently which appeared on the website Entrepreneur, the article was called ‘How to Deal With the Fear of Being Unqualified’. This headline struck a chord with me, not just because I work for Churchill Education, but because in the past, I’ve had exactly this fear, but a lot of the time, people are reluctant to talk about it.
No one wants to willingly come out and say it, ‘I’m not actually qualified to do this.’
So here goes: I never finished my Bachelor of Arts degree.
I got half way through when I actually landed a job writing, and wanted to concentrate on that rather than my studies. This led me to a career in corporate writing, and I eventually accumulated years of experience, but again, no formal qualification came from it.
When I finally decided to leave the company I’d built my career in, I was struck with the fact that when it came time to update my resume and prepare for an interview, I would have to be honest about the fact that whilst I had been writing professionally for five years, but…
I didn’t have a piece of paper that said I was qualified to do so.
I was lucky, in that I had applied to work for a company that valued experience and recognised that whilst I didn’t have formal qualifications, I was qualified to do the role. But, not everyone is lucky enough to find an employer that’s willing to look at experience alone.
In fact, a recent NCVER survey reported that 98% of professionals and 93% of managers considered qualifications VERY important when considering a candidate for a role.
What’s funny is that they didn’t say experience was very important, they said qualifications were very important. That could mean someone who has nothing but a piece of paper could have an advantage over someone whose actually been working in the industry for much longer, and that is a scary thought.
Because, you might not be looking to leave the role you’re in today, but in the not-so-distant future, a new role might come up that you just can’t pass up, it did for me! I had no intention of leaving my employer at the time, then a role closer to home, which suited me better popped up and that fear that I was ‘unqualified’ crept in.
So what can you do about it?
If you’re in the fortunate position of having years of experience behind you, and skills learnt over time, then getting a qualification might not actually mean going back to the classroom for you, because there’s something called RPL, which stands for Recognition of Prior Learning.
You might have heard of it before, and you might have heard it’s a pretty complicated and time-consuming process. And it can be, but that’s where we come in! We’ve been doing this for 12 years now, so you might say we’re experts!
