I've talked to a lot of women who've gone back to school, some who were just learning to read, some who were working on their PhDs. When I asked them if they had any advice for women who were thinking about going back to school, they had plenty. But every one of them said, "Do it."

It's not that they didn't encounter difficulties and frustrations, but these were outweighed by their growing self-confidence, their increased skills, their expanded network of friends and contacts, and, in some cases, their access to better jobs. As Van said, "Action leads to more action and it makes you feel better."

Another comment women made quite frequently was that they wished they had investigated a bit more before they chose their program. Once a woman narrowed down the field and decided what course she wanted to study, it was hard to take the extra step of checking out similar courses at other schools to see if she had found the best one for her.

I have also talked to women educators and career counselors. Their overview of the field of education and training confirms the experiences of women going back to school.

How this guide is organized

This book is organized so that first you look at yourself -- how you learn, how you gather and think about information. Then, you look at the job market. Next, you look at the things in your life that you'll have to organize in order to be able to go back to school — your time, your family, transportation and money.

Every woman's experience is going to be different. I couldn't possibly cover them all in this guide. What I have done is pick four starting points where women are likely to have the most trouble finding what they need — women who don't know what they want to do, immigrant women who need help getting into the Canadian system, women who need their high school diploma to move ahead, and women who want to get post-secondary training in the trades and technologies. If none of these is your starting point, there is still a lot of useful information in this guide about the training institutions — school boards, colleges, universities and institutes, Employment and Immigration Canada, private institutions and distance education.

This is not the whole story, but it will give you ideas about how to find information and how to organize it so it's useful to you and leads you to what you want. Throughout the guide there are stories about how different women have dealt with different situations. These stories, I think, tell the fullest truth about how the system works, and will probably be the biggest help in figuring out what you can do when you come up against problems.

The last word here goes to Heather Watt, a boilermaker who spoke at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). She said, "Along the way you're going to run into people who are going to tell you 'You can't do that.'   Don't believe them."