Approach learning like an adult
Take a look at your skills and analyze what activities they help to carry out better. How it affects life and career. Also highlight what is missing for the desired activity. After the first chapter, you should have an analysis of the current situation. Use it to figure out where to start. Then try to pump skills through experience. Choose a skill, read about it to decompose into components for a better understanding. Get to know the tools and application examples.
Then try it in practice. You can use training examples, someone else’s or fictional tasks. Everything is like in Kolb’s cycle. Fall into a trap in small iterations, reflect and repeat again. The main thing is that the practice should not be like at school. Abstract tasks in a textbook are not practice. You can’t read books about negotiations and become a great negotiator. It is impossible to master the project approach without real projects. Try to get involved in work, projects and situations that will help you get through the right experience. Forget that you will not succeed the first time, or you will make a mistake. Remember about the attitude to mistakes in order to prepare yourself. No one immediately smoothly released the clutch, gracefully skated or launched projects.
Everyone made mistakes in the beginning in order to gain experience. Don’t be the one who doesn’t go to the gym because he thinks the fitness people will laugh at him. It is better to gain experience in the main activity in order to use the time usefully, rather than spending additional time on training. If your current activity does not allow you to experience the right experience, then look for ways to learn with such experience. I consider mentoring, approved online courses, simulators, books and articles to be the most effective ways.
1. Mentoring
When I realized that no one needed a diploma, and I had to study again, I started watching all the IT-related content in a row without any strategy. I was interested in web development. I watched a video on how to make landing pages, what is the layout, what are the engines for websites, etc. Like at school. I received knowledge that I could not apply. Accordingly, I could not even understand them correctly. Fragmentary pieces of content helped me figure out how to do a separate task, but I didn’t understand where it came from, why it was being done, what roles were involved, and what the whole site creation process looked like.
Then I could not find such information on the Internet. In fact, I found it, but I couldn’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together because of a misunderstanding. When I got into web development, saw the process from the inside, walked around the rake and gained experience, then I figured out the topic. I have a complete picture of how everything works. I understood how it was necessary to study and what skills to develop in order to enter the profession faster. I also realized what I was doing wrong and paid for it with time. Many friends asked for advice on what’s the best way to get into IT and which direction to choose. In response, I was happy to give them a long read with a step-by-step plan on how to become a frontend developer. I thought that this profession is the easiest one to enter.
Eh, how such a plan would have helped me at the time. How much time I would have saved and how many bumps I would not have got. Without even realizing it, in moments of helping friends, I was a mentor. A mentor is a more experienced specialist who transfers knowledge to his ward (mentee) and helps to develop competencies. If you find a good mentor, you can learn faster. A big plus is that this is an informal transfer of knowledge from a person who has already passed the path ahead of you. You can ask direct questions, chat, sort out personal tasks or ask for advice. Here you have knowledge, experience, and support. The main thing is to find a person with real experience, and to make it comfortable for you to communicate. Now mentoring is gaining momentum and becoming fashionable. There are platforms and communities where you can find a mentor.
This is logical, since mentoring is a really cool and effective thing. I know this from personal experience, and we also have a Mentoring School course at Verno by red_mad_robot. We teach corporations and small IT companies how to organize mentoring of young professionals. I often conduct workshops on this course and see the difference between companies where there is mentoring taking place and where there is none. Therefore, do not ignore such an accessible and powerful resource. Find a person who understands the topic you need.
Write to him with a request for help. Offer coffee or help in return if it’s awkward to ask a stranger. You can use special sites, write a request to the general Mesto group or on the feed of a social network. Just try it. You will see that people will be happy to help or advise someone. Often, you can get a lot more for one call than for a whole paid course. No one will lead you holding your hand, but they will tell you the right vector and indicate what not to do. It’s very valuable when you don’t know what to do. Don’t waste time, find yourself a guide and when you become cool, don’t forget to help your mentee.
2. Approved courses
What kind of education even is it without courses? The reputation of this method of training is ambiguous, since the army of info gypsies and pseudo-experts spoils the reputation. Therefore, not all courses are equally useful. Almost every blogger has already done his course, guide or marathon. Tons of useless videos with a dull feed are advertised on social networks and do not benefit people. Despite this trash, I would not give up on the courses.
There are people who have knowledge and experience. They do courses as best as they can or they are found by course producers to help them and earn money themselves. Our task is to choose courses carefully. There are course authors who earn money due to people’s unwillingness to read books. But we can read, thanks. Therefore, it is important to choose courses where you can get a new experience, listen to someone else’s experience and discuss your tasks. I believe that a good course should be similar to mentoring. The expert must have real experience that he can confirm. There should be an opportunity to view materials or get demo access to see how an expert talks about his experience and presents information.
There must be practice in the course. Checking assignments by an expert with comments and discussions, one-on-one sessions or collective reviews, working in pairs, thesis, analysis of your tasks or relevant real tasks. A good sign is when streams with preliminary interviews are recruited for the course, or in another way, a request and expectations are collected from you. See if the course is being finalized, and how changes or additions are made after feedback from students. Communicate with those who have completed the course, and do not look at fake reviews. When the author is a professional, he has nothing to hide, and you will find all the necessary information. Evaluate the courses in cold blood and choose wisely. Choosing a course is not an easy task, since there are few quality courses. Use the advice of the professional community on the topic or a mentor. When you take a class course for the first time, you will understand the set bar and will be able to choose good and affordable courses faster.
3. Simulators
Interactive services that mimic the real experience are gaining momentum today. One of the first in IT was the Go Practice simulator. It is still working and collecting positive feedback. Go Practice simulates working in a product company. As a product owner, you develop the product, communicate with different roles and make decisions. All training is built through a chat. No bells and whistles, just a dialog box, but the script and real tasks do their job since exactly such tasks will need to be solved at real work. In this format, a new experience is learnt better and more useful. Simulators are also appearing in other areas.
There are ones for startups, project managers, and financial literacy. Using only simulators is not very effective. They can be good in case of the lack of practical knowledge and gain new experience, but without the theory of full-fledged training, they will not work unless enough theory is given in the simulator (and it is difficult to find this balance of theory and practice). But this format is similar to a game, so it’s interesting to learn. The more the content is similar to reality, the better. Simulators can also include offline simulations. For example, negotiation clubs, role-playing games, hackathons or group discussions of cases.
Offline simulations can be in courses. For example, in Verno, the “Mentoring School” is conducted in the form of an inverted class. Students watch short videos with theory on the topic of the block, and at the end of each block there is a workshop where real problems are solved and cases are discussed. All the training cases are written on real situations, so the audience responds a lot and discuss them with interest. Choose simulators which are similar to courses. Check whether the simulator is just an e-book or a universal robot answering machine. Look at the scenario and case examples. Try it, and then buy.
4. Books and articles
The simplest and most obvious way, about which it makes no sense to talk for a long time. Simple books can be used to immerse yourself in the topic, and after trial and error, move on to more complex books. This way knowledge will be better transformed into skills. Otherwise, it may happen when you read books in English that are not at your level. You start with a difficult one, you don’t understand anything and quickly quit. One piece of advice can be given about books and articles: just read them.
I clearly remember life before and after reading. Until 2014, I didn’t have the habit of reading. Boring school curriculum discouraged the desire immediately and for a long time. Everything has changed in the subway. In 2014, the daily four-hour commute to and from work helped forming the habit of reading. My phone didn’t connect to Wi-Fi, so I downloaded dozens of books at home and went through them on the way until I liked it. Books have greatly influenced my life, thinking and development. I completely agree with Ivan Zamesin’s position about reading books. Read his article “How to Read a Lot” and watch podcasts with him. You will definitely have no problems with the choice of books. At the end of the book, you will find a list of 60 books that will help you delve into the processes of analysis, planning, management, optimization, reflection and learning.
Whatever method and format you choose, try to learn from enthusiastic people — experts in their field who live by it and share knowledge not only in paid formats. Most often they have their own channels or community, which is full of free useful information. Whether a person is passionate or not, you will understand without unnecessary movements. I will never forget one of my first projects at red_mad_robot with Sergey Galtsev as art director. We were making an application for couriers, and after testing the MVP, the concept changed dramatically. As a result, the deadlines are burning, there are no additional resources and no budget.
The client and I are thinking about what decision to make, and Serega has been thinking all this time about how to properly make a warning for couriers so that they do not interact with the interface in a moving car, since it is unsafe. That was the first time I saw that “thinking about the user” can be not only beautiful words for an interview. Of course, Serega saved everyone, and everything ended up well. You always want to learn from such people. They set the bar high, give energy and result. In the case of Galtsev, it is enough to see where his graduates work and how his mentee’s career is developing. I was lucky, I got to know a lot of such people in red_mad_robot. If there are no enthusiastic people in your environment on the right topic, then add them to your networking plan and find points of interaction.
When you get into the taste of learning, get used to learning and begin to better understand the composition of skills, then take the process to a new level. Collect a skillset for yourself and make a development plan. A systematic approach to learning will lead there sooner or later anyway.
Just don’t try to make yourself a superman who knows everything. Always ask yourself, “why do I need this skill?” to strengthen what is strong and valuable for you, and not to fill out the skillset. It is necessary to learn not because it is fashionable or shameful not to study, but to develop one’s standard of living regardless of the development of events. By improving the standard of living, I mean not only improving financial conditions for greater freedom and security, but also improving my emotional state, thinking and perception of the world.
“Studying chess textbooks only paves the way for learning to think independently”
M. Euwe
