a post by Fernando Dal Re, cofounder of Pupilum*

Education is the most powerful weapon one can use to change the world.

Nelson Mandela

Education is mandatory for the first few years of our lives, and then it is not uncommon to keep on studying until your mid twenties. After that, we spend around forty years working, where learning happens, at its best, on the job. Yet science and technology are continuously evolving and demand us new skills and abilities to meet with the requirements that these innovations carry with them.

¿But how can we update our knowledge if we spend most part of our days, and lives, working?

First, we must reckon that education is something we need to keep working on continuously, and then, we have to find the time for it to happen and a solution that fits in our demanding schedules.

Online Education is a great solution for that problem. With online education you can study wherever you are, whenever fits best for you, at your own pace, and even at a fraction of the cost of traditional offline education. It is true however, that online education is still behind traditional offline education in many aspects, but it is true too, that new technology is helping close the gap at a fast rate.

As a symptom of this, in 2014, global Ed Tech financing has reached at peak. Now you can learn design, web development or photography for as little as 25$ a month with Lynda.com, attend online classes from World’s top universities for free at Coursera.org, subscribe to a year long course of English for just 20€ at Busuu.com or land a job at the best companies in Silicon Valley by completing one of their courses at Udacity.com.

You only need to decide what you want to learn, devote some time a week for learning and invest little money compared to what you will obtain from it.

A path to follow: Continuing Medical Education

The fields of medicine and science never stop moving forward, and neither do health care professionals. In fact, doctors know that what they learn at university only accounts for 2% of the knowledge they use in their clinical practice throughout their careers. As for the other 98%, they must learn it on a continuous basis.

Continuing Medical Education (CME) is the tool doctors and other healthcare professionals use in order to stay up to date in their specialties.

A recent poll conducted by Neomed to more than 2.000 doctors in Spain showed that, on average, doctors spend over 120 hours of their time a year completing CME courses. And there was no relevant distinction in the time invested by doctors in their thirties to doctors in their fifties. Doctors are the perfect example of lifelong learners.

But just like any other professional, doctors have demanding schedules that allow little spare time within the job to devote to learning. They are used to invest their free time, usually from their weekends, to assist to courses held in hospitals and congresses that, in most occasions, are out from their hometowns. The majority of the CME courses available today are still being held offline, which makes them expensive and time consuming. This is a real pain for doctors, professionals that are busier than ever, splitting their time among work, family and Continuing Medical Education.

At Pupilum, we are offering online CME courses that enable doctors to study at their own pace, whenever they want and wherever they are. We partner with top notch medical teams to deliver courses in cardiology, pediatrics, psychiatry, dermatology, allergology and infectious diseases within many others. All our courses have official accreditation, which makes them accountable for the professional development of our students. If you think of doctors as the perfect example of lifelong learners, we want Pupilum to be their first choice when looking to update their medical education.

Final thoughts

At a time when youth unemployment is at its peak, and the skills that new jobs demand are many times not met by the skills most people have, continuing education is the most powerful tool we have to make an impact and advance in our careers. Where pressing schedules and scarce resources try to distract us from gaining new knowledge, online education offers a perfect solution to both problems. It is now easier and cheaper than ever to update our education and become lifelong learners. If you don’t trust me…ask your doctor.

*Fernando Dal Re is cofounder of Pupilum, an elearning platform for doctors launched in Spain in 2013. Incubated in IE’s Area31 Accelerator, and the winner of IE’s Venture Day in Madrid on May 2014, Pupilum has already delivered courses to more than two thousand doctors in Spain and Latin America.