continuous learning

 

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Continuous learning and up-skilling are important to us as individuals, to our employers, and to our countries. So, what have we learned this week? Do we have someone to accelerate our learning process? Do we have learning/training plans? Or are we buried with too many activities and do not have time and energy to learn?

We learned a lot when we were in school because we were students and our main objectives were to learn and get good grades. Many of us went extra miles to read and educate ourselves to outperform our peers academically. There were academic systems to guide us; and teachers, tutors, and instructors to assist us. However, once we were done with schools, we were left to our own devices to learn. We may be lucky to get a good mentor at work; or a good boss to push us to learn. The bottom-line is whether we have the aspiration, discipline and motivation to continue to learn.

I feel that the initial for learning is not easy for many people when we are no longer students, and we are occupied by a lot of other things like starting a family, socializing, taking care of dependents, etc. Therefore, learning may not be our first priority, we may just learn enough to get our job done and that’s it. Most importantly, we always know that it is important to learn new skills.

The good news is that many software companies (I cannot speak about other kinds of companies and organizations because I know little about them) have training plans for their employees. We learn as we work (as software technologies evolve), and attend trainings, workshops, and conferences. We often find ourselves surrounded by a group of talented engineers who we can bounce ideas with, and learn from.

Typically, software engineers with over 10 years of working experience have a repertoire of software development skills. We share our knowledge, ideate, knock down barriers, and innovate to create better products. During this kind of process, we learn to push boundaries and rethink how things can be done. We often walk out of this meeting with a lot new knowledge.

To further accelerate learning and collaboration, we have Brown Bag meetings. These are informal learning and sharing sessions where domain experts share information on interesting topics to get people excited; and solicit collaborations and contributions to their works.

There are an abundant of learning opportunities for software engineers, such as online courses, and tutorials. We also have online programming challenges at LeetCode, HackerRank and Kaggle to sharpen our programming skills. We can also help to answer interesting questions at StackOverflow.

It is obvious that continuous learning is important. We need the initial and momentum to learn. It can be anything from climate change to something related to our work. It is also important to help others to cultivate good learning habit. In this manner, we can be more informed and be able to make better decisions individually and collectively. This will make the world a better place.

interesting articles:

https://hbr.org/2017/01/make-learning-a-lifelong-habit

https://hbr.org/2018/01/4-habits-of-people-who-are-always-learning-new-skills