There are no two ways about it: if you want to keep up to date, do your job better or prepare for a promotion, you have to make the time to learn. Increased confidence and preparing yourself for a career change are top of the list of the work benefits and personal rewards learning brings.

If you have been inspired by colleagues and friends signing up for courses as a new school year gets underway, why not invest half an hour in your own learning to find out how you learn best? There are two quick and easy ways to go about it.

Are you an activist, theorist, reflector or pragmatist? In less than half an hour, you can find out and start to understand what your preferred learning style means for how you learn most effectively. It’s a small investment of time and one as relevant to your learning as reading course materials, listening to a podcast or doing an assignment.

After all, there’s little point in throwing yourself into a collaborative session about renewable energy if you would learn more through puzzling in private over lists of data. For some, coaching can bring management concepts alive. For others, roleplay will do it much better.

In 1986, Peter Honey and Alan Mumford identified four main learning style preferences. Since then, their original learning styles questionnaire has been updated several times and continues to be widely used by educators. You can complete the short version of the questionnaire (40 questions) by downloading it free from the website of sports coach Brian Mac.

For a different online approach to learning style preferences, visit Brainboxx, which offers a range of free resources for people with ‘a passion for teaching and learning’. Its learning styles preferences test asks you to choose one of three options in 18 groups of learning-related preferences to find out whether you are a learner who prefers to look, listen or be hands-on.

The site also offers free guides to help you make the most of your preferred learning style, no matter what course or subject you are studying.

Before you get down to the nuts and bolts of a new course, it is important to think about how you prefer to learn. The excitement about what to learn and where to find a course means many people overlook this aspect of learning. Find out first, before you take the plunge!

Unionlearn formed a partnership with the National Extension College (NEC), the online and distance learning provider, last year. The partnership entitles union members to a 10% discount on all NEC courses.

You can choose from a wide range of subjects, including teaching and learning, childcare, counselling, and business and management, as well as GCSEs and A levels in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. NEC is the UK’s only not-for-profit provider of skills-based and vocational subjects.

Launching October 2015: new syllabus A levels in sociology, business, economics, English language, English literature, biology, chemistry and physics.