Pandemic Learning

What have been the positive lessons for you?

Your time studying at school or college has probably been a very unusual experience. And regardless of what your future plans are, it is worth thinking through your pandemic learning experience. The aim of this blog is to help you identify what you’ve learnt and recognise how you’ve coped during a very unexpected event in history. These lessons will hopefully help in your future studies and career.

1) It’s easy to assume that just because the internet has been around all your life, that you’ll be a digital native. Having spent time learning online, are there any gaps in your digital skills that are worth addressing? Why not try this digital skills audit? https://www.digitalskills.ed.ac.uk/

2) Understanding how you learn best will really help you in the future – regardless of whether you go to university or not. Do you learn best when there are people around you who you can interact with? Or do you learn best when having the quietness of your own space gives you ‘thinking’ time? Or perhaps a mixture of the two?

3) The time may have given you a chance to reflect on what your values are and what motivates you. Has this impacted on your career planning in any way yet? There’s been an increased interest in health related careers and pharmaceutical research careers for instance (the NHS has 350 careers in it – https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/ ). How would you like to use these values and motivations to build your best life?

4) Without getting too ‘deep’, regardless of how the pandemic has been for you, your attributes are still the same – its your values and motivations that will shape how you put these attributes into a longer term career. The Your Future Choice psychometric tests (https://www.myfuturechoice.com/) will be really helpful in identifying your attributes and how you can use these!

5) How do you do the social side of life? Are you a social butterfly who needs to ‘flutter’ around with lots of people or are you comfortable with a smaller number of closer friendships and family? Understanding this will give you a better insight into how best to develop your ‘networking’ skills for your future career. ‘Networking’ can seem a daunting skill to develop but it shouldn’t be – and you are already doing it without realising. Working out if you are more of an introvert or extravert will help your networking develop without it feeling ‘fake’.

We hope these questions are helpful to look backwards with. You will have learnt a great deal about yourself during the Pandemic, and hopefully there will be some positive lessons to learn from your experiences.

Here at My Uni Choices we specialise in helping students, parents & educators make the best choices. Review all the Universities & Courses here or discover more About Us & the best uni courses for you, finally if you’re ready let’s take The Test to find out what course or degree you should do.