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Here’s a career option for those women who really enjoy rolling up their sleeves and doing their own renovation work around the home. Maybe already you have branched out in a small way after your friends have admired your work so much that they have asked you to work the same magic on their own place.

This is how many high profile decorating companies have started; many simply began as a husband/wife concern and then expanded until they were hiring contractors themselves.

There’s no limit to what you can take on so long as you know what your are about and are equipped with the basic tools at the off.

Home decorating can be achieved with the simplest tools, particularly if you want to do interior painting, plastering. Make a list of what you need:

* ladder

* air tools

* protective clothing

* power leads

* tape measures/slides

* safety goggles

It costs around $100 to paint one room so using this as a general guide should give you an idea of how to budget when setting up your supplies; don’t forget to make use of any equipment you already have…it pays to take out accident insurance as well for the unexpected.

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It’s surprisingly easy and I mean by way of a real university too, not one of those “send us $20 and we’ll send you a degree” places either.

The way to go about it is to look at the distance learning universities. These are set up to let you do degrees by way of part-time study and so you can spread your degree over up to 12 years or so vs the typical 3 years full-time. I’m sure that 12 years sounds like a very long time but that’s around the maximum time and most people complete their degree within 6 years which passes very quickly indeed.

So where do you start? It depends entirely on you and what you’re interested in which is another refreshing difference from full-time universities. You can assemble a unique degree programme personal to your interests if you want to, or you can follow a “normal” university programme if you want to do that.

Let’s take a real example from the Open University (which offers one of the most complete and flexible programmes around). Go to their website and the first thing that may surprise you is that they do research degrees (doctorates and the like) in addition to first degrees: their range is as complete as that.

Continue on to their undergrade subjects and you’ll find the broad university departments listed. If you went through each of those you’d find hundreds of courses listed so there’s sure to be something to interest you. Ah, but you’d need qualifications to enrol? No, you don’t. You can enrol on any course you like without any previous qualifications. Now, in reality that usually means any “level 1″ course as levels 2 and 3 courses may require knowledge that you’ll have picked up at level 1.

If you’ve not done any university study before, one easy way to try it out is to enrol for one of their 10 point level 1 courses. You do these over about 3 months and they’re a great way to introduce you to their teaching methods. If you pass the course, the 10 points are counted towards your degree so it’s not wasted time.

For our example, say you’re interested in learning the French language. If you scroll down to Languages then click on French, it’ll give you a rundown of all their French courses. Don’t speak any French? No problem, they’ve a beginners course. Speak a little but not sure how your level maps onto their courses? They’ve self-tests to help you decide which course is right for you.

What if you don’t want to sign up for a complete degree? You don’t have to. For each course that you do, they’ll ask you what qualification you’d like to assign it to, but that doesn’t commit you to continuing through to the end nor even to doing any further courses. In fact, I originally assigned my courses to their BA open degree but found that I could get a BA Honours in Modern Languages after a few years and started aiming for that instead: all the courses I’d done before that were just transferred over to the new degree.

Once you start though, many people find it quite addictive and end up going right through the programme. Whilst most do the courses part-time and get a degree after about six years, a growing number of people are following the courses full-time and getting their degree in three years.

We’ll cover how to select your courses in the next installment.

Arnold.

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I am introducing a new short series with my guest blogger, Arnold, who will talk about how to go about preparing yourself for taking on a course of study as a mature age student.

If you are a woman at home, a busy career girl looking to take on some extra study or are simply interested in how to organise your home study more efficiently, this will be of great interest to you.

Arnold has years of experience in adult education and has many effective tips and ideas for getting the most out of your course and utilising that precious spare time you have.

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