Whether changing your career or extending your skills, distance learning has options for both. The Open University, a longtime pioneer of the distance learning course, is now joined by others, including Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education (ICE), MIT, Harvard and Stanford.

Abundant online resources offer (almost) anything you can imagine: The best websites around have diverse learning courses, professional coaching and guidance, languages, training in specific workplace skills, and practical skills including graphic design, WordPress development and how to work with self-driving cars. Leaders in the online learning field include Khan Academy, Lynda, Udemy, Udacity, edX and Coursera. You can check out these lists of the 24 best websites for learning new skills and 43 great free courses offered by Udemy, edX and others.

Companies too are seeing the value in sharing their specialist knowledge. Google is now offering courses ranging from big data and machine learning to inductive reasoning, AI and customer segmentation. Meanwhile the Bloomberg Terminal offers courses on financial markets, economic indicators, currencies, equities and income, access to pre-built financial models, and advice on networking, industry research and how to (subtly) do a thorough check on prospective interviewers. And Entrepreneur magazine offers some great specialist courses, including search engine optimization (SEO) and Adobe CC.