As hubskregulars know, I'm 50 now, and have had quite a weird and wide-ranging career.
Today, I am a well-paid writer for a tech company, with an AA degree in Fashion Design that I got on a lark about a decade ago.
Looking ahead at the next 10 years of employability (or so), I will face ever-increasing pressure from younger workers who will work for less, and have more accreditation than I have. My capacity for learning will naturally diminish with age, as well. Competition for my job (and salary) will only become more fierce, and I need to take some defensive measures to protect my perceived value.
To do some preemptive fortification of my resume, I have been considering doing some sort of online certification(s) or higher education.
Simple things like a PMP certification will be a drop in the bucket. Many people get them to establish their bonafides as Project Managers. This is probably something I should definitely get. So I'd like to get recommendations... anyone PMP certified? Know a good program? (I would prefer online self-paced work, so I can finish it as quickly as possible.)
What other degrees, certifications, or accreditations are good someone in the late stage of their career, looking forward into the 2020s?
(Anyone who says MBA will be blocked and mocked mercilessly.)
My financial planner made the argument to me that the real money comes from authoring your own standard. My experience has not been good, but everyone I've ever known that self-identifies as a "project manager" is a hot mess. With your experience I don't know that a PMP cert would feather your nest in the slightest; they're for people who do karaoke on Fridays, not the guys who worked for IFOR. I would estimate the time you could stuff into a PMP and apply that to what you could do to visibly, demonstrably, attributably improve where you are now because that's one thing nobody else can put on their resume.
I'm just looking at fortifying my bonafides, honestly. I can see the tide is rising, and my beach house is gonna be threatened in a few years... so I'm looking in to boat building, seawall technology, and relocation options. Ya know... if the water rises too quickly, a guy needs to have options. And I like getting a paycheck and benefits.
I know the son of my parents friends always was kind of a loser (according to what I was told anyway). Never finished university, always borrowing money from parents and gasp smoked weed. He created a company at some point, that was basically living off government subsidies, but it worked okay until the government funds dried out and their employees were caught doing shady shit to make more money. So he got an MBA at an expensive university in Toronto. And now he moved to LA and has an awesome 6 figure job at a tech company. This is the only MBA related story I know, told through my judgemental parents lens. I mean, I know the guy and met him multiple times. He's really nice :) But this whole story has put some doubts in my mind about what an MBA is actually for.(Anyone who says MBA will be blocked and mocked mercilessly.)
I've just worked with MBAs for most of my career in the tech industry, and always the most clueless person in the room, with no idea how tech works, is the one with the fresh MBA. The people who actually know what they are doing don't mention their MBAs, or - if they do - it's as a joking aside. "Oh yeah... I got one of those somewhere. I think it's over in that cabinet." The general gist of an MBA is that you have a broad range of business process knowledge that isn't very deep. So it looks good, and you have all the right buzzwords, but any plan you put in place will be destroyed almost immediately upon contact with reality. Because things are hard. And there are a LOT of actual experts out there, who can show you the flaws in any MBA's plan, about 2 levels below the surface.