Anton Barrett, DkIT’s Head of Lifelong Learning states 

“We are one of the fastest growing colleges in the country in terms of part-time student numbers. There has been a 160 percent growth in the number of part-time students enrolling with us since 2014. This compares to a national growth rate average of 38 percent. Even during the turbulence of COVID-19 we saw a surge of 25 percent growth in our student enrolments.”

The selection of part-time courses, available from this September, range from Certificate to Masters level. Many will be delivered wholly online or in blended format, which is a combination of online and on-campus teaching.

Two new exciting Masters courses scheduled to commence in September - an MSc in Computer Animation and an MSc in Games and Extended Reality - are available free of charge or heavily subsided through the Springboard scheme and are open to employees and the self-employed as well as the unemployed. Strong demand is also expected for the new Certificate in Culinary Skills which is also available free through Springboard.

Flexibility is a central tenet in part-time education. While DkIT has a number of degrees available they require a large time and intellectual commitment by the learner. Increasingly, however, the college has taken parts of its degree programmes and offers them as certificates.

Certificates like this are available in popular areas including business, marketing, digital marketing and data analytics. “We simply extract the modules from our degree programmes and make them available in a nice ‘bite-size’ flexible format” Said Anton Barrett

DkIT is also continuing to expand its continuous professional development (CPD) to the health sector. Anton added “The Institute is one of Ireland’s leading CPD providers to nurses and midwives working in the public and private sector,”. DkIT’s suite of clinical CPD courses cover areas like general nursing, perinatal mental health, respiratory nursing and intellectual disability.

Another popular programme run for regional enterprises by DkIT is the Certificate in Lean Six Sigma.  The course typically runs on-campus over one semester but has also been delivered bespoke to major employers including Manor Farm, Lakeland Dairies, PayPal, Cargotec and, most recently, Combilift.

This Lean Six Sigma course is highly attractive to companies because the centrepiece of the course is a work-based project undertaken by the student. This is a live scenario where Lean and Six Sigma principles and tools are learned by the student and applied to a work scenario producing real savings for the company well in excess of the fee paid for the course.  It is obviously one of our most in-demand courses attracting participants from manufacturing and service industries and from the private and public sectors alike.

All courses are now open for enrolment for the forthcoming academic year via www.dkit.ie/parttime.  If you are thinking of joining DkIT you are guaranteed a warm welcome with small class sizes making for a personable learning experience.