What do you do for a living 2scoops to be able to afford an 'extra' 200 grand? Gizza job.
Extra 200k, well I don't have much of a mortgage left, plus a few savings. IT contractor for 13 years if you must know.
...
"Hello, is that Learn Direct? Yes, I'd like to book a course in IT please. How long for? errm, I want to be qualified by the time the Housing Market has bottomed out".
Well done you 2scoops that you have almost finished your mortgage and you're still looking to better yourself. Well done indeed.... Oh by the way, just out of interest, what branch of IT would you recommend someone should study towards at the moment?
The UK IT market is absolutely booming at the moment as no-one studies it at colleague anymore, apparently it's a bit hard, probably nowhere near as some of the trade quals.
Me, time served I supposed, learnt it from the processor up, know far too little now, was, but not now particularly technical.
Areas to go into, that is really difficult, the grass roots IT industry in the UK has been decimated. I came from a developer background :-
Assembler, C/C++ Cobol, Fortran, Java, Basic. Scripting, Mainframes to PC thru Unix.
The money is now in consultancy, which is a load of old sh*te, you can get old sad bastards like myself or you can get 20 year olds.
I really don't know, I think maybe now would be a good time to get on board, although it's not easy for some odd reason, because, there really aren't that many IT people around, at least those who know what the hell they are talking about.
Oh, BTW, you can't study for consultancy (well not unless you work for accidenture)
Apart from that, .NET C# Unix Java J2EE (which all really use C Unix and anything thats quick) but deeply deeply technical in the finance markets will get you about £800 a day.