Well done! Discovering this piece indicates you're probably pondering over your options, and if it's re-training you're considering then you've already got further than the majority of people will. Can you believe that hardly any of us are fulfilled in our working life - yet most won't do a thing about it. Why not stand out from the crowd and make a start - those who do hardly ever regret it.

It's in your interests that before you start any study program, you discuss your plans with a person who is familiar with the working environment and can point you in the right direction. They can look at aspects of your personality and give you guidance on the right role for you:

* Would you like lots of contact with people? If so, do you want a team or are you hoping to meet new people? Or would you rather work alone with a task?

* The banks and building sector are not coping well these days, so think carefully about the sector that would give you the most options?

* Having completed your retraining, are you hoping your new skills will give you the ability to see you to retirement age?

* Is it important for your study to be in an area where you know you'll have a job up to the time you want to stop?

We ask you to have a good look at the computer industry - there are greater numbers of positions than staff to fill them, and it's one of the few choices of career where the industry is still growing. Contrary to what some people believe, IT isn't all techie people staring at their computers the whole day (though those jobs exist.) Most positions are filled by ordinary men and women who like receiving larger than average salaries.

Ask any skilled consultant and they'll regale you with many awful tales of students who've been conned by dodgy salespeople. Stick to a professional advisor who quizzes you to discover the most appropriate thing for you - not for their pay-packet! You need to find a starting-point that will suit you. With some work-based experience or base qualifications, it may be that your starting point of study is very different to someone completely new. Consider starting with a user-skills course first. Beginning there can make the slope up to the higher-levels a much more gentle.

Students often end up having issues because of a single training area usually not even thought about: The way the training is divided into chunks and delivered to your home. Delivery by courier of each element piece by piece, as you complete each module is how things will normally arrive. While seeming sensible, you must understand the following: What would happen if you didn't finish everything at the speed they required? Sometimes their preference of study order won't fit you as well as some other order of studying might.

Ideally, you want ALL the study materials up-front - enabling you to have them all to come back to in the future - as and when you want. Variations can then be made to the order that you complete your exams if you find another route more intuitive.

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