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I graduated from college almost exactly a year ago. On the day of my graduation I thought that I would never go back to school again. Based on the current job market and job descriptions that I have seen, it seems to make more and more sense to go back to school and take more classes. While I don’t think I am ready to go for an MBA, I do think there would be some value for me to get some professional certificates.

There are many Universities out there that offer certificates for the working person that can be completed fully online. This is what I plan to do. It makes more sense for me to do it this way because of my work hours. They tend to vary widely based upon how the day goes at work. Because of this I would probably have trouble making it to a 6:30 class on a consistent basis. Therefore, I think online correspondence classes would work out best for me. The two schools that I have looked at the closest are the University of Virginia and UC-Davis. These schools seemed to have the best online setup for the courses that I was interested. The other thing that I liked was that they were a traditional University rather than a University of Phoenix that seems to be more of a business than a University. I also looked at the University of Villanova’s online course offerings, and theirs seemed to look more like a business than a traditional University even though that is what they are. UMass also has a lot of online choices, but none seemed to fit with what I wanted to do.

So my next step is going to be to look into when I can start. It appears that I can start just about any quarter and take as many classes as I feel like per quarter. I will probably just go with one class per quarter so that I don’t get too overwhelmed with everything else. After that I need to look into whether or not my employer will reimburse me for this. The certificate will cost about $5,500 plus books and other fees to complete. My employer will reimburse up to $2,000 per year. That would be a very nice help if that would work out. So I think my goal for this week is to see if my employer will compensate for it and then go from there.