Studying at bachelor's level while working
What 1,200 hours of Level 6 study does to eighteen months of a working life, and what the learners who finished did differently from those who did not.
Almost everyone we have referred to LSPM for a Level 6 diploma has a full-time job, and a good proportion have a family, a commute and a manager who does not know they are studying. This guide is for them. It is not a list of study tips; those are easy to find. It is an attempt to describe honestly what the commitment is, where it bites, and what separates the learners who finish from the ones who drift.
The arithmetic first
The OTHM diplomas on this site publish a Total Qualification Time of 1,200 hours: 480 guided, 720 your own. Qualifi does not publish the figure but the same ten-hours-per-credit convention gives the same order of magnitude for a 120-credit award. Spread over eighteen months, which is what most working learners choose, that is about fifteen hours a week. Over twelve months it is nearer twenty-three; over two years, about twelve.
Fifteen hours a week is two evenings and most of a weekend day. It is not impossible. It is also not nothing, and the learners who struggle are almost always the ones who did not sit down with a calendar before they started and find those fifteen hours. Find them now. If they are not there, the honest choice is a slower pace, not a hope that they will appear.
The shape of the work
The hours are not evenly spread, and knowing this in advance prevents a great deal of anxiety. A twenty-credit unit runs for a defined period. Its early weeks are reading and taught sessions: light, interesting, deceptively easy. The middle is where the assignment gets planned and the reading gets purposeful. The last fortnight is writing, and it is heavy. Then the assignment goes in and there is a fortnight of almost nothing before the next unit begins.
Learners who treat the light weeks as time off and the heavy weeks as an emergency burn out by unit four. Learners who use the light weeks to draft, even badly, arrive at the deadline with something to improve rather than something to invent. This is the single habit that most reliably predicts completion.
Your job is the material
The assignments on these diplomas are about a real organisation, and for nearly everyone that means their employer. This is a considerable advantage. You do not need to research a company from its annual report; you are inside one. The operations review you write is of the operation you run. The people strategy is for the team you lead.
It also means a conversation with your employer, sooner rather than later. Most are supportive, some will sponsor the fee, and a few will ask to read the assignments, which is a compliment. A minority will have confidentiality concerns, and those must be respected; LSPM's tutors will help you anonymise or, if necessary, choose a public organisation instead. What does not work is writing about your employer without telling them and hoping nobody notices.
Returning to writing
Many of the people we advise have not written anything longer than an email in years, and the first assignment is a shock. The vocabulary of academic writing, the conventions of referencing, the expectation that a claim is supported by a source rather than by experience: these are learnable, and LSPM's tutors teach them, but they take a unit or two to become natural. The first assignment is often referred, particularly where research methods are involved. A referral means feedback and a resubmission; it is not a failure and it does not appear on the certificate. Learners who take a first referral as evidence they cannot do this are wrong, and we tell them so when they ring us about it.
The people around you
A partner, a family or a flatmate will notice fifteen hours a week disappearing, and it is better that they understand why before it happens. The learners who finish tend to have negotiated the time explicitly: this evening and this morning are study, and in exchange the rest of the weekend is not. The ones who drift tend to have tried to fit study into the gaps, and there are no gaps.
Colleagues are a different matter. Some learners keep their study private; others find that a colleague on a similar programme, even in another subject, is the most useful support they have. There is no right answer, but isolation is a risk factor and a study partner reduces it.
Pausing
Life happens over eighteen months. A new job, a bereavement, a child, an illness. Registration with the awarding body runs for a defined period, and within it a learner may pause between units and resume. Pausing is not failure, and every tutor we have spoken to would rather a learner paused than submitted work they were ashamed of or stopped answering emails. Tell LSPM early; the options narrow if you tell them late.
What the finishers did
Looking back over the people we have placed, the ones who completed did a handful of things the others did not. They found the hours in the calendar before they started. They drafted during the light weeks. They told their employer and their household. They treated the first referral as feedback. They asked for help by email in the week they got stuck, not the week before the deadline. And, almost without exception, they said afterwards that the diploma had changed how they did their job long before it changed what they could write on their CV.
None of that is remarkable advice. What is remarkable is how reliably it works.