Writing for life

Last week contrasting scenes of agony and ecstasy were played out around the country as the long wait for leaving cert results finally came to an end. I still remember the bitter sweet anticipation of waiting for my exam results to arrive: the excitement of wanting to know tempered by a healthy dollop of nervous apprehension; the churning in the pit of my stomach at the creaking of the front gate.
If you got the results you wanted last week, congratulations. If you didn’t… also congratulations. Regardless of the actual results you achieved, you’ve reached a significant educational milestone. Secondary school is behind you, and you’re entering a new chapter of your life.

Some of you will be heading into third level education to become doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, biologists, lecturers, teachers, chemists or whatever. Others will be embarking on vocational education leading to a recognised qualification in a given trade, while some of you will decide to head straight into the workforce. Perhaps you don’t know what you want to do yet, and have decided to take some time out to travel, to experience a bit of the world before embarking on the next phase of your career.

Whatever category you fall into, the truth is that your education never ends. It will continue for the rest of your life.
 
From the moment we’re born we start to assimilate information at an incredible rate – we learn from the world around us, from our parents, from other people. We learn to walk, talk and tie our own shoelaces. We go to school, we learn to read, write, count, spell. We learn that even teachers aren’t always right, and that, occasionally, even our parents can be wrong. We develop our own views and beliefs based on our perceptions and experiences of the world around us. We read, talk and listen. We watch television, surf the web and listen to the radio. We live.

That process never stops – we’re learning all the time, and today we have more opportunities to learn than ever before. We’re bombarded by a seemingly endless wave of information. What we chose to do with it all, of course, is up to us.

Continuing our education, both on a formal and informal footing, is something that’s vital not just to our own development, but to the future prosperity of the Irish economy. Talk of the new “knowledge economy” and the need to up-skill our existing workforce to take advantage of the opportunities that it presents is rife. In a recent report FÁS, the employment and training authority, indicated that most of the jobs created over the next five years will be in the higher skilled category, demanding more educated and knowledgeable individuals to fill them.

By embracing education throughout our lives, and seizing every chance we get to further our own learning, we put ourselves in a position to take advantage of whatever opportunities present themselves.  We also get to play our part in the new “knowledge economy”, helping to sustain Ireland’s economic prosperity into the future, and that can only be a good thing.

Technorati Tags: Exam results, careers, lifelong learning, up skilling