Studying online for a new career is challenging. Life has a way of disrupting your expectations. No matter how enthusiastic you might be to begin your Path, chances are that something can disrupt your learning and push your off course.
No worries. We can catch you back up!
The Basics
One of the first things to do when you realize you have fallen behind is to email your Student Success Manager to book a call. Your Student Success Manager is here to do whatever is needed to improve your progress. This includes helping you plan for a vacation or recover from time lost to an illness, or locating new learning opportunities. Our webinar program can be very useful for improving your learning experience!
Your Student Success Manager will likely recommend that you reach out to your mentor. Set aside a session to discuss your progress so far, the barriers to your learning, and what can be done to improve your momentum. This may include finding alternative or supplemental resources, or even changing mentors to someone whose teaching style works best for you personally.
Organizing your Path
There are many online platforms perfect to assist you in your learning. Here are some that we recommend that have free versions:
- Asana - this is a project management website that allows you to create goals, sub-tasks, due dates, descriptions, and more. Excellent for guiding your progress and setting goals each week!
- Todoist - a similar task list program, ToDo allows you to document your goals and assign deadlines that fit into each week’s unique study time.
- Trello - this website allows you to break down your big projects into boards with cards for each step of the way. As you begin, progress, and complete each step, the card is able to update by status or completion. You can even share your progress with others and collaborate with peers as you work on your projects.
Useful Courses
OpenClassrooms focuses on project-supporting courses that help you develop the skills you need to be job-ready. As part of that mission, we have produced a wide range of courses that can also help you be a better co-worker and employee. Some of these soft-skills courses can be useful when you are catching up on your Path. Take a look at these for instance:
- Learn how to Learn - Many chapters of this course contain specific tips for improving your learning style to enable you to speed up and absorb challenges to your learning
- Learn how to work autonomously - An excellent course summarizing strategies, online applications, and mindsets that can improve your work as you study online
- Taking stock of your skills - Review how you can identify your strengths and improve individual areas as you seek to catch up on your Path
- Work Effectively on a team - See tips and application examples for organizing big projects with multiple people. Much of this advice can apply to individuals managing bit projects
- Prepare Professional Documents -- Tips on note-taking skills that can help you organize your data more clearly
- Speak in Public - Organize your projects and improve your assessments
Additional Resources
Making up for lost time requires you to be organized. A Study Schedule with project deadlines can be great for adjusting the time you require to catch up and finish on time. Sometimes lost time can be due to motivation or time management issues, and we have articles for that. The Help Center has a great word-searchable database for resources ranging from the simple password reset to more complicated questions.
External resources can be particularly useful. Our first recommendation is to check in on Workplace, where you can connect with other students, mentors, and OpenClassrooms employees. You can post questions there or peruse the conversation. Please check out our Workplace Knowledge Library, which contains a collection of resources from coding websites, online communities, and more.