Owning Your Own Business

“If you want to succeed, you should strike out on new paths rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.” – John D. Rockefeller

John D. Rockefeller certainly knew something about success—he was the founder of an oil company that dominated and revolutionized the industry and he became a very wealthy and influential business man as a result. However, Rockefeller didn’t start at the top—his first job was as an assistant book keeper. Because he refused to be content with the status quo, he eventually climbed to the top of American business.  

Rockefeller is certainly not alone. History is full of examples of people who pushed ahead and didn't accept things only as they were. When have advancements happened by simply following established practices in a monotonous circle? Was Alexander Graham Bell satisfied only communicating messages through telegraph? Did Dr. Joseph Lister chalk infection up to a risk of surgery for patients and move on? Did Steve Jobs look to the technology of the day and copy it? Most pioneers in a field don’t follow the path most traveled to leave their mark on the world. They take a chance, act on a hunch or instinct, and push into the unknown on their own path.

Are you tired of status quo in your life and in your career? Are you ready to take a chance and blaze a new trail for yourself by advancing your degree and your career? Get started on the path to earning your online degree with help from The College Network and top university partners like Indiana State University, Regis University, and Tulane University (just to name a few!) and open doors to career advancement and new ways to put your distinct mark on your field. You can get started right away—there is no need to wait for a new semester to begin. Contact us today and strike out on a new path to success!

Are you tired of working for someone else? Have you thought about starting your own business? Owning your own business requires a lot of creativity, strategy, and determination. Below are six tips to help you start your own business: 

1. Know your customer – Understanding your target audience is vital to starting your own business. The more you understand your audience, the better your chances of creating products they want to buy.
2. Test your idea – Find out who would buy your product. Be sure to test your idea before you spend too much money and time on it.
3. Pick a sales strategy – It is important to know how your product will be marketed and sold to your consumers. If sales is not your specialty, find the right person (or people) to market and sell your product.  
4. Write a business plan – Writing a business plan requires research. When writing a business plan, it is important to determine your market factors, starting costs, job responsibilities, organizational structure, and the vision for the business.
5. Find good people – Take time finding the right people who will be willing to work hard for you and your business.
6. Mind the money – Do not underestimate your expenses. Think about how you are going to fund the business and how you are going to support yourself until the business is up and running. 

Read more at: http://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/T049-C006-S001-six-steps-to-starting-your-own-business.html?page=2

If you're interested in setting your own schedule and working for yourself, contact The College Network to learn more about opportunities for starting your own business as an independent Program Adivisor. Opportunities are available nationwide. 

With spring upon us and summer following soon after, my thoughts are on schedules. My husband always groans as the calendar pages turn to summer months because he knows that the pristine white squares representing the days from June through August will soon be filled with a mass of names, places, and times. I, on the other hand, delight in the calendar with its busy squares. You see, I adhere to the philosophy of Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He says, “The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities,” and during the summer, I have a lot of priorities!

Once you decide to advance your career by earning a degree, your education has to become one of your main priorities, and if you follow Covey’s thinking, that means you have to schedule it! While adhering to a schedule may feel like putting chains on your life, having one can actually give you a different kind of freedom—the freedom to achieve what you truly want to achieve. Instead of thinking of a schedule as taking away from your ability to do what you want at any given moment, think of it as giving you the ability to do what you want with your life and your future.

One of the benefits of earning your degree online is that you can do it at your own pace, fitting it around a full-time job, family time, and social commitments. However, that freedom can quickly become detrimental to your goals if you don’t make a point to truly incorporate study into your daily or weekly schedule. To find balance and ensure that you meet your goals, making a schedule is imperative. Here are some tips for creating a schedule:

1. Mark the set parts of your day on your calendar. Set parts of the day include work and family commitments; they don’t include catching the latest episode of American Idol! Doing this can help you determine the time you have that is essentially "free."
2. Schedule in time for yourself: eating, exercising, sleeping. You learn best when you are healthy, so take time for yourself!
3. Next, consider your educational goals. Determine deadlines for taking exams and mark those on your calendar.
4. With your deadlines in mind, schedule time to devote entirely to study. You may find it helpful to schedule study for the same time each day, preferably a time when you are most alert. Even if you end up only reviewing your notes for fifteen minutes, you are staying engaged with what you are learning every day.
5. Make sure that you plan enough time to study throughout the week to stay on track and reach the goals you set for yourself. According to Carolyn Hopper, author of Practicing College Learning Strategies, you are more likely to remember what you study in the first twenty minutes and the last twenty minutes of a study session, so each study session doesn’t need to be long. You just need to make sure you have several study sessions spread throughout the week.
6. Block out some time on your schedule where you can be spontaneous, flexible, and free to do whatever you choose! Everyone needs a little break now and then!

The most important thing to remember when it comes to creating a schedule for achieving success is that it must be realistic. It has to be something you can actually follow; if it isn’t, you can easily become discouraged and give up. Do realize that sometimes you will have to deviate from your schedule. Things come up and schedules take a backseat. Don’t let that discourage you! Just get back on schedule as soon as possible. If you find that the schedule you created is no longer working, make adjustments and continue on.

Make earning your degree with The College Network a priority and enjoy the freedom that can come with success!

If adult learners are not given the opportunity to create such an experience or encouraged to find existing connections that they can build on, they may revert to treating the material as something to be memorized, rather than understood.

—Kathleen Taylor

Connect

According to Wolf (2006), when curricula, courses, and assignments focus on discrete parts of learning material rather than the big picture, adult learners have difficulty remembering and understanding because they do not see how everything fits together. I learned this firsthand during my days of classroom instruction while teaching in an Interactive Media program. One of the courses I most enjoyed teaching was Advanced Interactive Media. I liked teaching this course because it allowed students to effectively utilize the information they had learned in the prerequisite courses to design and develop meaningful and useful products. However, there was always a handful of students who had completed the lower-level courses successfully but were unable to make the necessary connections between what they had learned in previous courses and what they were required to do in the more advanced course. Not only were they not engaging in basic connection of information as it pertained to the material and skills they were supposed to be learning in their courses, but some were quite confused about the fact that I wasn’t going to re-teach them how to develop instructional graphics, design an interface, or effectively use a cuing mechanism. Rather, it was my duty in the advanced course to provide them the opportunity to utilize what they had learned previously to more complex and life-like situations. This was frustrating for both me and my students because as the instructor I needed to be able to operate on certain assumptions in order to effectively teach the course. 

As a method of addressing these issues, I began presenting a mini-lecture before delving into the material for the more advanced course. This mini-lecture advised them as to how they should approach the semester if they wanted to be successful in building a knowledge base and skill set that would serve them well professionally. 

The essence of the lecture:

Students who begin each course in their program as if they are starting at ground zero are missing a valuable opportunity to make meaningful connections that will serve to build their knowledge base over time. Everything you do and learn is connected to where you are heading professionally. The assignments in your classes aren’t just projects we assign to keep you busy. The projects are allowing you to learn and perform in a manner that allows you to make the necessary mental connections you will need as you progress in your program. You see, you aren’t just taking courses; you are actually completing a curriculum for which each of the courses is addressing certain objectives. Each of the courses included in the curriculum leads to the development of knowledge and skills that are not meant to stand alone but rather to build upon one another.

Connecting the Disconnected

In the end, I couldn’t lay the entire burden at the feet of my students. Did my fellow colleagues and I do enough to help our students understand how the courses were interrelated? Were there ways in which we could have better supported students in making the proper connections between the courses and content? Could we have used technology to allow them to refresh or remediate as needed? Were we all teaching our courses as stand-alone entities that may or may not have supported the students’ abilities to understand and effectively complete the curriculum in a meaningful manner? As learning professionals, the manner in which we develop learning experiences must require and support learners so they can connect the portions of information they are learning. This is a very important part of the learning process, especially when engaged in self-directed (self-regulated) learning. Are we helping our learners develop strong knowledge structures, or as posed previously, are we approaching learning based on the knowledge we want to share with our students rather than starting with where they are in the development of their own knowledge structures (Zull 2006)?

We all have to answer these questions both as individuals and collectively if we truly want to have a positive impact on our students’ learning and lives.

Kind Regards,

cd

In this very competitive economy, businesses are looking for ways to increase their efficiency while also improving their customer focus and response.  Now more than ever Lean Six Sigma methodologies, which include five lean principles:  define, measure, explore, develop and implement have come to the forefront.  The lean goals are to eliminate waste, improve business processes and increase customer satisfaction and these have become key strategies for companies.

More and more busy professionals are choosing to move forward in their careers by obtaining their Lean Six Sigma Certification online.  And by gaining your Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification and then Black Belt Certification, you can greatly increase not only your career opportunities, but also your earning potential.  

Here are 5 ways you will benefit from obtaining your Lean Six Sigma Certification online from The College Network and Purdue University.  

1.  Increased job opportunities--certification will set you apart from those without it when you are job searching.  As well, you will find you have more opportunity in your current position.

2.  On average, Lean Six Sigma Black Belts earn $88,226 a year, according to Salary.com.  

3.  Learn from Master Black Belt instructors at Purdue University.

4.  Earn your certification from Purdue University, a global leader in engineering and business.

5.  Build your network of professionals from different fields and level of experience,  throughout the country.  

Those should be more than enough reasons to get started.  Call us today at 866-249-2131 to learn more about Lean Six Sigma certificate programs and discover your own ways that it will benefit you.  

If you’ve been thinking about going back to school to earn your Bachelor’s Degree in nursing, now’s the time to do it. The demand for nurses is at an all-time high, with the American College of Medical Quality predicting a national shortage of 300,000 to 1 million nurses by the year 2020. The increase in demand is largely credited to the rising healthcare needs of the aging baby boomer generation.  

But conditions aren’t just calling for more RNs --many experts expect the BSN degree to become the new entry-level requirement for nurses. Currently, only about 50 percent of nurses in the U.S. hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. In order to meet national demand, the Institute of Medicine reports that 80 percent of nurses will need to hold bachelor’s degrees by the year 2020 -- hence, the “80 by ‘20” rule.

In response, The College Network® will continue to provide our customers with the means to earn their Bachelor’s of Science in nursing from the comfort of home. Through our partnership with Indiana State University, The College Network offers the only distance-based LPN to BSN program in the country. If you are an LPN or LVN, you probably have a busy lifestyle as it is. By enrolling in our BSN program, you can obtain your bachelor’s degree at your own pace and ensure career stability in the competitive years to come.

If you are ready to take the next step towards becoming a contender in tomorrow’s healthcare market, contact The College Network and speak with a Program Advisor at 1-800-395-1014.

I need inspiration. I find myself pondering over and over--"what should I write my blog about?" So, my inspiration for my blog is just that--finding inspiration.  

Oftentimes adults who are pursuing their online degrees, need some inspiration to study and move forward in their programs.  Inspiration is a hard thing.  It tends to sometimes be fleeting. But, when it is with you, you find that you have an energy and focus that is hard to deny.

So, let's talk about some ways you can find inspiration.  For me, I look at blogs that I have written, articles on the internet and think about the experiences of the past week.  Maybe I can help you find some inspiration by connecting you with others who have also completed online degree programs or certificates.  

First of all, meet Reme Prusynski, who was in the business world for 30 years before she decided to go back to school to become the nurse she had always wanted to be but had never thought she could.  Or Jean Brennan, who decided to become a registered nurse because of 9/11. Karen Renick had been laid off, and it was then she decided start a paralegal studies program in hopes of securing a new position.  She went on to start her own paralegal business.  

Feeling inspired yet? If not, and you need more--just check out other success stories to find someone who is like you.  And when you're ready, call The College Network at 800-395-1014 and we'll help turn your inspiration into a reality.  

                                              
Did you know that a Bachelor of Science in Business is one of the top five in-demand degrees right now?  Surprised?  But, when you think about the broad scope that this degree encompasses, it isn’t surprising in this changing global economy, that employers are looking for those people that can adapt and have the ability to manage multiple areas in their company.

The College Network partners with Bellevue University and offers several options when it comes to a business degree.  You can concentrate on a Bachelor of Science in Business Analysis and Management, Bachelor or Science in Management in Human Resources and other business management areas of focus.

With Bellevue University’s cohort approach, you will be assigned to a group of peers like yourself, with similar professional and work experience.  You will work through the entirety of your program with this team.  You will be able to draw upon their experience, while sharing yours.  This will create a strong foundation and help to mirror a real-life work experience; a practical application that will be used upon graduation.  

Obtaining your degree online gives you flexibility, convenience and the choice to work at your own pace.  If you are an adult that is working full-time, an online degree is something that you can fit into your busy lifestyle.   Call us today at 800-39-LEARN to find out more about business degrees and how you can get started today on a new career path.  

Education
Earning your degree in nursing will open up more job opportunities and put you in a higher paying market. The College Network offers online nursing degrees, business degrees, certificate programs, and more from top universities and allows you to earn them at your own pace.

Resume
Keep your resume updated. There is definitely a skill to writing a good resume.  They say the average employer only spends ten seconds looking over your resume, so you have to sell them in that short amount of time, to bring you in for an interview.  There are many free websites that offer tips on writing resumes as well as professional companies that offer resume writing as a service.

Online Resources
Most companies have turned to the World Wide Web as the primary source for posting available jobs. It is important to check as many employment web sites and the career posting section of company web sites often... I would recommend twice a week (once in the beginning of the week and once at the end). 

References
References can be one of the most important pieces of your resume when landing a job.  A good rule of thumb is to always have three references to support you.  When choosing references, it's important to choose people who will say positive things about you and your work. References should be professional and not personal (no family members). Previous employers, co-workers and professors/instructors make good references.

Network
You must do this always! Many times landing a good job is all about who you know. It's also important to remember that even though you may not personally "know" someone in the health care industry, you may "know" someone who does "know" someone who can help you get a job. Don't be afraid to ask friends and family to keep their eyes and ears open, and don't be afraid to remind them, often, that you are still looking for a job.

I end on "network" because we constantly hear "network, network, network," but what does this really mean? Stay tuned for a future blog that will explore the act of "networking." Until then, call The College Network at 1-800-39-LEARN and speak to a Program Advisor about signing up for a distance learning program.

Ali Kral spent fifteen years as a personal trainer before deciding to transition to a legal career. She worked as a legal secretary for five years before deciding to become a paralegal. “I worked as a paralegal for nine months, not really cutting it. I looked into paralegal programs and most could take up to two years. The Boston University program only took fourteen weeks,” she said.
 

As a mother of six, five of which are still living at home, Ali is a busy woman. “I’m also a track coach and involved in many extracurricular activities, so this program was absolutely right for me. Financially, it was great. With six kids either in college or headed to college, I was even able to pay my loans on unemployment wages,” she explained.

Amazed at the achievable structure of Boston University's distance education program, Ali thinks online education is a great way for anyone to pursue their education. “I thought I couldn’t work and do the program, but the way it’s structured makes it doable. What’s amazing to me is that we choose to send our children to traditional college when distance learning is built for success. You can focus on each class and assignment in your own time without the added pressure. I would never say it’s easy. You have to be studious to make this a reality, but it works,” she said.

Read more of Ali Kral's story here. Or, read about The College Network's other successful customers.