Zaher’s story: Skill building as a life-long learner

My name is Zaher Talab and I have lived in Jordan for a long time, but I’m originally from Syria. I decided to start online learning at Kiron, for I was fascinated by politics for many years and I wanted to convert it into a career.  

With just an old associate degree that had not sufficiently satisfied my motives for deep sciences and academic studying, I found excitement in resuming university studying again on the Kiron campus. It gave me exactly the same feeling as when I was in the first year of college, which was amazing for me because it made me begin a new life and forget about what happened in the old one. 

I’m an older student at Kiron. I had registered at the time when Kiron was focusing on university transfer tracks and programs. In 2018, I began my online learning journey by studying the Political Science track for about a year, in addition to some English courses, Marketing, and some other courses at Coursera, Futurelearn, and Edx. I was a diligent student, and I published my story for the Kiron students’ community. It was about my previous career as a radiographer technician and the benefits of Kiron’s opportunity for a career switch into a political researcher career.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find any opportunities to transfer my study to a formal university, even for an online one. So I decided to continue studying other tracks at Kiron even after finishing the political science track. I chose Social Work and Business Economics tracks in a political context as an alternative path to a real university. Because Kiron had such an extensive resource of courses and materials, I was very happy and didn’t care about having a degree as much as having a high-quality education.

But at the start of 2019, I discovered that the Political Science track had few job opportunities. In addition, I was facing difficulties continuing to find a job in my previous field of work as a medical technician, which was supposed to help me continue my long Kiron journey. With a heart full of sadness, this made me have less time for such long term studying. Kiron began to introduce the goal of studying short career path courses. So, after deep thinking and researching, I made my decision to take the Content Writing career path in English by taking advantage of many English courses I had studied at Kiron and the additional MOOCs to build on them.

In order to become a content writer, I knew I needed to learn how to write articles. So I continued to level up my English skills and learned all the skills required for professional writing. I began with some small projects of online freelance writing in late 2019 and early 2020 for some content agencies for a small fee, considering it as practical training. Alongside that, I was achieving a lot of learning from studying informal online courses and tutorials from successful, celebrated content writers on the internet. Then, I got my first writing independent clients in late 2020.

My first client was an old friend who needed precisely the blend of my writing skills with my medical and digital technology backgrounds. From then on, I was able to find more and more clients over time. And this helped me to choose technology content writing as an on-demand niche for this new career, which also at the same time has satisfied my passion. Now, I can consider myself in the first stage of success at this career path, and I love to share my hard work story. But most importantly, to mention the role of Kiron studying that helped me reach this first success point.

I believe that you, as a Kiron student, don’t need full degree certificates to lead you directly to a career. Despite there being no specific courses focused on becoming a freelance content writer at Kiron or Coursera, I benefited from taking several classes about English, business, history, and digital technology. And currently, I’m still studying IT Kiron and Coursera courses to level up my technology knowledge and English skills.

You can reach career goals without professional degrees. Skill building is much more important to be successful in life in the 21st century. Master your field through studying many different courses. Trust me, I loved studying Kiron courses more than my previous traditional college.

You can see Zaher’s career content writing achievements and read more about him via his website CopyingDigital.