E-skills: several ways to improve your e-skills for free

Many people do not even think about getting to know a bit more the programming languages, saying this is simply not for them. Well, just because you are not planning to become a programmer, doesn’t mean you have to be isolated from the technology. After all you live in 2013 and if you want to have strong hard skills when applying for your next job, you should consider at least trying to understand how they work together. Then, working with developers would be much easier.

The good news is that you do not need to pay for that knowledge, and you definitely do not need to study informatics in the university. Here are several tips what online tools to use in order to start and improve your e-skills. It’s not that hard once you have a goal.

I will start with quite inspiring project of a girl with art background. People with art background do not have that analytical thinking like the guys keen on maths. What that means is that if she can do it, than you can do it too. Check out Jennifer Dewalt’s project 180 websites in 180 days

Codecademy is a website where you can start learning the basics from the scratch. They have great tutorials about front-end and back-end stuff. If you haven’t tried html, css, javascript, php or ruby before, you can start right away there.

It is all about experimenting. Once you get the basics, you need to spend more time on trying different stuff with your new knowledge. Do not forget that if you have any questions, you can ask Google. It should be the first place to look for answers, because in most of the times someone already solved your issue. You can also always check how something should look like in html, css, javascript etc. on W3Schools – they have a lot of examples and tutorials as well.

When it comes to the software you have to instal, one of the best editors is Sublime Text. You can check out this tutorial to make sure it is right for you.

Once you start creating stuff, try to improve it all the time and create your portfolio. Nowadays great examples of your work is much more worthy than certificates and diplomas from coding courses and schools.

Education: 5 reasons why education matters

Some billionaires say that education doesn’t matter when you have strong entrepreneurial spirit. Famous and successful entrepreneurs like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates don’t have bachelor or higher degrees. So, if you don’t – there is a chance for you too.

Here are 5 reasons why education can be helpful and not at the same time. It depends on you which side of the coin you are going to pick:

Article: People below 25 don’t do anything?

Recent statistics overview made us think of a really significant problem: 40% of the young people up to 25 years are not occupied in working or studying at the moment. What are these Bulgarian youngsters doing then?

It does not says in which cities are these 40% located, but the number is significant and some solution should already have been found. Here is more of the statistics analysis:

– more than 60% of the occupied young people are working on low qualified jobs in bars, shops, security;

Education: Izpitai.me – online tests and training

Education is surely one of the critical topics among the Bulgarian society. Currently we are facing the result of its decay, but the good news is that many people are trying to fix that. There is a great success story of a small team eager to do something to support the online education.

Education: career paths

There is a significant gap between the employers and the newly trained specialists finishing their University studying. There was a publication by the leading HR companies like Manpower and Jobtiger, where was stated the problem of not finding skilled professionals in some fields. Surely, there are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is the lack of clear career paths in Bulgaria. Most of young people in schools and universities are struggling to decide what to do with their lives because of the lack of information and also, are struggling to find job in their professional field simply because the employers are looking for different skills.

Education: moodle and other platforms in BG universities

Online tools and systems in universities are a common practice all over the world, but our recent research found that it is not the case in Bulgarian biggest universities. A research with students from some of the most wanted universities like Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Medical University Sofia, Technical University Sofia, Shumen University “Konstantin Preslavski”, New Bulgarian University, University of National and World Economy Sofia and the National Academy for theatre and film arts showed surprisingly bad results when it comes to an online system like moodle.

Education: English is a must; third language is important; 4th is a plus

Here comes another topic about education: the way kids learn new languages now. Well, I am sure it is quite different from the time I did (simply because we didn’t have youtube, Wikipedia and online dictionaries at that time), but I know how it is in my little niece’s kindergarten.

Education in Bulgaria: Gamification

There is no doubt about that: video games saved several generations of Bulgarian youngsters from the inborn and enforced earnestness in their early years. This typically Bulgarian skill is defined by Steve Keil (american enterpreneur) as a “baba factor” (baba in bulgarian means grandmother). Basically meaning that kids are often taken care of by their grandmothers who make them (unconsciously) believe they are not good enough to do anything big with their lives.