Opportunities does helps a lot to give a person a chance to do something he already wanted, not helpful to a person who wants something else. As such, if I did not want to do mobile apps, I really doesn't matter if the opportunities are there, it will seems like I'm being forced right ?
When I was just a junior developer tasked to do all these, I'm also packed with other things daily like operations to other projects, not as if I'm really that free. Reading a book often outside my job timing like before I go to work, after I work, during weekends. It's not like I'm sitting in office just plain reading. In office, I will be searching on the web, doing the work required and developing on the mobile software and reviewing with the customer.
It's always about passion and determination to get you started on something. It's always about the hunger to want something that makes you take the effort to do something. So perhaps you should really reflect on how hungry you are at learning new stuffs.
You may now change a stance in telling me how your working timing, your heavy workload and having you are not giving opportunities, therefore you feel a course will cut you some slack. that's not the same as being doubtful on learning yourself, am I right ? How you would like to manage your own time and your direction is something you want to think about, because I can fully assure you, there a lot more self reading and venturing in the matters on hand to really be industrially competent. Therefore if you are not willing to burn some midnight oil to further equip yourself with knowledge outside your line of work, you are just having a head start and then fall by off the cliff when you don't use it or work on it
That begin said, I would like to share with you that besides mobile development, there are a few more other things that are not part of job scope at first and I venture into it myself too. Such as Amazon Web Services Cloud which I end up using it before my company even set her foot into it later. Learning new programming languages which my company don't use till now. Learning embedded system development like Arduino, RaspberryPI which may be helpful for IoT and more. Even as I'm a consultant today doing presales, I still have to on my own pick up new programming languages and other technologies just to expand my knowledge.
You cant depend on your job to give you all that exposures. You need to plan for your own career roadmap and if it takes a job hop, do it. I hope what I says make sense to you.
Hence like I have started in this thread, I certainly _DO_NOT_ object you from taking up a course, but I'm only highlighting to you there is nothing substantially niche about mobile development these days that can't be self learnt when there are so many of us out there doing mobile development without going through such a course. Of course, how good they are or I am (to u) is something hard to just share with you over the forum. Lets just say I can develop mobile applications creating my own interactive widget, such as a scrolling tab, just by photoshop bitmap design given to me. It's more than just knowing mobile application, it will require your effort to work into art related design too and human computer interaction knowledge.
If taking up a course works for you, go ahead and do it but knowing what you are getting into. I am assure you, the course will only scratch the surface and you will still need to do a lot more yourself. Really not much difference.
