Value of OU study

Paul: The Open University qualification is a real qualification that means an awful lot to potential employers.

Rachael: Because you've got to be very motivated to be able to come home after a day's work and then be able to pick the books up and start studying.

Ramesh: My job usually demands more than eight hours work every day, sometimes it goes between ten to fourteen hours and with that kind of a workload, I think only Open University gives me this option of studying at my free time.

Rachael: I'm studying the courses I want to study. When I want to study them. How I want to study them. And for me that means that I'm more dedicated to the subjects that I'm studying, because it's my choice to go there, and it's my choice how I develop myself further within my career.

Paul: If you've got somebody who's in their 30's or 40's or in my case 50's, or even older, they have had the ability to knuckle down and actually do this particular study. It's a prized qualification and I would argue with anybody who says it's not.

Stephen: A university gives you the way to think, the organisation of thoughts, but the key thing is it gives you a way to reflect upon yourself that enables you to change course; that enables you to take upon new sets of information, to be able to actually deconstruct new sets of information in a fruitful way to actually organise yourself to then solve other problems in other parts of the world.

That is by nature a clever thing to do. And so what he actually meant was more it teaches you how to be a smart Alec. No, it teaches you the actual mechanisms of what people might regard as clever, but actually they lie underneath this: there's a way and the way is actually very self reflective.

You've got to keep, you know, might some people might take it to the nth degree and say, you know, it's a kind of what would you call it, practical humility. What you can do is you're actually looking at yourself from the outside all the time, never taking yourself for granted, being able to move around, to be able to taking new information in, which is a key skill.