Patterns for Managing Your Career Learning Needs

Intro Figuring out what to learn, how much to learn, finding time to learn it - it’s not simple and it adds a lot of career stress. Today I hope to inspire you to find one or more learning patterns that works for you.

Do We Share the Same Challenges? How many of you have failed at a diet? Are saving enough for retirement? Worked on a project that failed or ran long?

What are the challenges? Figuring out what to learn that sustains or adds to our value in the market Finding the most effective way to learn the things we decide we need to learn Limiting the time (and money!) we devote to learning to a level that makes sense based on career and family phases Fear that we’re not doing enough!

Mildly Prescriptive I can’t tell you what to learn, when to learn, or how much time/money to spend on learning Just like a diet, you have to find one that works for you Just like a diet, you’ll fall off plan. That’s expected! Or look it as project management

Pattern: Know How You Learn Blog posts. Podcasts. Video. Books. Classes. Self paced labs. Total DIY. What reinforces learning best? Taking notes. Doing the task. Explaining it to someone else. Taking a test. What’s your attention span? Small chunks or several hours at a time? Can you do solo learning or do you need more structure?

Pattern: Prioritize What You Learn You CANNOT learn it all What would make you worth more in your current job? What skills do you see in job ads in your specialty that you don’t have (or could improve) It’s not wrong to learn things ‘just because’, but that is still prioritizing

Pattern: Conquer The Overload New release, new features, new ideas. Some will stick, some won’t. What to learn? Learn it all, but master none! Shallow dive per feature - 5 to 10 minutes each. See what might be valuable to you, your employer, your next career step. Then decide if any are worth deep dive

Pattern: Incremental Learning Newsletters, podcasts, RSS feeds, all are a great way to push content to you daily or weekly. It need not take long to consume, it’s better if it doesn’t! Part is news - what is going in your part of IT? Becomes a daily habit to be informed, learn a little.

Pattern: Quarterly Reset You will fall off of plan. Too ambitious, work demands, life. It’s OK. Really, it is! So reforecast and be more conservative if you didn’t make the goal. It’s also ok to totally change your path/goals during the reset. Set goals based on what you can see NOW, not what you saw THEN

Pattern: Have a Rhythm Push learning can help you keep a rhythm Calendar reminders too What is the best time of day for you to learn?

Pattern: Progress Tracking Calories. Steps. Weight. Measure what you care about, measure the lead indicators. For learning, hours is the easiest, but it can also be videos watched, exams passed, etc. This is the one that no one wants to do! Have to make it low friction. How can you do that?

Build Your Plan Tracking progress to a milestone (in some form) Has incremental learning baked in One or more deep dive goals per quarter If nothing else, a calendar reminder once a quarter to set goals. Bonus if you have a checklist for building the goals

Thanks! @SQLAndy www.linkedin.com/in/sqlandy