New Qualifications for the New Year

What's your New Years resolution this year? According to research conducted last year almost 75% of us will be adding a professional goal to our New Years resolutions in 2014. This may be looking to progress your career and climbing up the ladder, perhaps you want a completely new career or maybe you're even considering going back into education. The possibilities are endless and more of us this year will be looking at career moves than in the past five years!

The reason for this being, since the recession started people have been much more reluctant to leave their jobs or look for new jobs. This is because jobs were becoming increasingly more unstable and the last thing you want to do is leave for another company and find yourself out of work. However, as we have slowly moved out of recession more and more people are looking at new careers and job opportunities. Even so, in the majority of cases, most people will still remain with their existing employer, adding new qualifications to their CV rather than leave for another job.

Of course, the great thing about gaining a new qualification is this can stay with you for life (or at least five years in the case of SMSTS courses!). This can help you to progress your career over the years. However, if you choose a New Years resolution like 'lose weight' or 'save money', this may not be as beneficial to you in the future.

So, once you've decided to undertake a new qualification, what kind of course should you take? It has been proven that one of the biggest growing industries is the health and safety sector. The reason for this being, whatever industry you work within; retail, construction or even an office, you need to be aware of health and safety regulations. There is also increasingly more regulations to remember which means your knowledge needs to be constantly updated.

Over the last year there have been over one million work related health and safety incidents reported. On top of this, there have been twenty seven million working days lost due to health and safety accidents. Whilst many happen on the construction site, there were also a high number which occurred within an office environment due to trips and falls. This shows that everyone is at risk.

Have you kept your employees up to date with health and safety regulations? Will you be undertaking a new qualification in the New Year?