Few of the consulting companies offer introductory courses online making it even more accessible, but I recommend taking the hands-on courses face-to-face with other participants to make the learning experience real life and pertinent to your current business environment.

FORBES: 3 Steps to Identify the Analytics Training You Need

Then there are the ministers who, by definition strangers to the seamier side of life, find themselves on inspection visits, face-to-face with scary inmates either hopped-up on illegal drugs, or zombified by prescribed ones.

BBC: A Point of View: Prisons don't work

Regional newspapers relish tales of posties' life-saving heroics - resuscitating a choking nine-month-old boy, carrying a blind pensioner out of a burning house or spotting the jaundiced face of someone with liver disease, to name a few real-life events.

BBC: Are we falling out of love with the postie?

"When you face death directly as I did with this experience, you tend to look at life differently, " he said.

CNN: Surviving a flesh-eating disease