Education - Learning How To Learn
Start on Your Own Two Feet
Many people in transition are looking for a way out. They're in a dead-end job, or have an unsatisfying career path, or see the end to their job prospects in the not too distant future. They see the future in technology, and all the continual opportunities available to those who are within the field, and know that technology is where they need to be.
There is just one problem: they are not developers and don't even believe it's possible to become one!
They've seen the movies of coders, focusing on dark screens of green text, typing away at lightning speed, and thinking they could never do that. They listen to keynote speeches from big shot Google techs, talking about the latest technology, and don't understand one-tenth of the things they're discussing. They see the 'hello_world.py' tutorials on Code Academy and see very little semblance between that and what 'real' developers do.
But when one desperately wants to move forward, where does one start?
Education Is The Start, and The Best Way Is To Start Big
When you're feeling overwhelmed, but know you have to make progress, there's only one answer: you start by learning and make the decision to not be stopped. I know this from my personal experience.
In 2011, I had known that I wanted to be a developer and had made a few attempts to move forwards. I found some tutorials online for learning development. These were web-based learning tools that taught the basics of development in JavaScript: loops, variables, functions, objects, and other programming basics. It felt like learning, but there was always the same problem: after a week of learning, I would try to use what I learned and realized I knew very little. It never seemed like I was making any meaningful progress. The hours I put into studying didn't really seem to translate into work. So, I stayed where I was.
Then in early 2012, I went to an entrepreneur Bootcamp at MIT to, effectively, find a technical co-founder. If I couldn't build my own technology, I could partner with someone who could. After a week at the conference, I learned one thing, that most people found very little value in early-20's business ‘leader’, and that if I wanted to build software, I was going to have to do it myself. I went from a place of wondering how I was going to be technical to deciding I was going to be a developer and I didn't give a damn who said otherwise.
So, I went back to the online courses and decided I was going to go deeper, much deeper. I vetted 10x the number of courses I had before to find something that worked for me. I eventually found a course called "Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed Shaw, and spent the entirety of Q1 2012 learning Python. I spent over 200 hours in that first-month of learning, diving deeper than I ever had before. It was much harder than my previous learning. But by the end, I was actually developing real programs. And they were mine.
This was the start of the right path.
Learning How To Learn is The Key to Continual Career Mastery
No matter what your goal is, the first and most important path is to decide to move forward. But the next important thing is to under HOW to learn in your field. Moving into a career in technology in 2020 means you'll have more options than ever before to learn technology. This includes YouTube tutorials, MOOC's, Books, Bootcamps, Twitch Streams, Mobile Apps, Alexa Skills… the list is endless. You can make the mistake of just falling into one course after another, making very little progress, or you can find the learning strategies that will help YOU make the most progress.
The type of learning that helps a seasoned developer is not going to be the same tools that help a newcomer. A programming tutorial designed for application developers may not be incredibly helpful for data application developers. A JavaScript tutorial series hosted by a CS graduate may not be as useful as the course written by the Business grad turned lead programmer. The variability means that you have many options and must choose a path that works for you. For me, the frictionless browser programming courses taught me nothing, but "Learn Python the Hard Way" challenged me in a way that made the lesson stick. For others, that won't be the case and easy online learning will be the best path.
As you continually come back to educating yourself in your career, matching the available learning opportunities to what works best for you will be your path to self-mastery. You will eventually learn that no matter where you are, there are always things for you to learn and start, even in the toughest of environments.
Working Session: Self-Analysis To Learning How To Learn
If you haven't thought about learning to learn, you're not alone: most people rarely put the thought into their meta-processes and don't take the steps to understand themselves. Here's a short set of questions you can ask yourself to start making progress towards understanding how you best learn:
In your education and self-learning, what have been the MOST valuable learning experiences you've had in your lifetime? Write three to five experiences that have really resonated with you, whether they're in a formal educational environment or something less structured. For each of the experiences you identified, ask yourself the following questions:
What made this experience particularly valuable for you? What makes it stand out among the thousands of other learning experiences in your life?
For this educational experience, was it largely AUDIO driven, VISUAL driven or ACTIVITY driven, or READ/WRITE driven?
For each experience, were you working alone, or did you work with someone when learning? Were the best parts of learning interacting with someone else, or when you were working alone?
What was the media that you used to learn? Was it an in-class discussion, video courses, books, or some other sort of educational material?
Finally, create a list of the 3 to 5 most productive learning resources you've had over the last five years. These can be things you learned for your career or a hobby. Of those learning resources, answer the following questions:
How did you find these resources? Did you google the resources, found it on a social media website, learn it from a friend?
Did the learning resource provide you a lot of structure, or was the learning largely unstructured?
Did the learning come with human resources you could communicate with, or were you largely on your own for learning? If you could communicate with someone, did you have face to face learning, video conferencing or text communication?
Were these resources you largely paid for or found for free? If you paid for them, were they worth the cost associated with the program?
Now, think of the 3 to 5 most productive learning experiences in the last 12 months and write those down. For that list, answer the following questions:
Is there a particular time of day that is MOST common for you to learn during? Is it in the morning, evenings, or different time of day each time?
Is there a frequency of learning that works best for you? Is learning once a week in a big chunk make the biggest impact, or does spending 15 minutes a day learning do the most?
How was your learning environment during these times? Were you in a place with a lot of activity around you, or were you alone someplace to learn?
Was there any particular time you did NOT want to learn, but still found the ability to make progress on your learning? If so, what were the circumstances around that learning opportunity?
With these lists, sit back and do one last review asking yourself the following question: are there any surprising or useful trends that emerge? Here are something things that I learned when I went through this activity myself:
I see myself as a largely extroverted person, but my 100% best learning has come from quietly diving into a subject myself and getting isolated. Group learning just doesn't do much for me.
The best learning programs I have had in my life have always happened in the evenings after the day starts to die down and things get quiet
I learn the absolute best from courses that are structured, where the instructor has a complete idea of what they want me to learn. Loose structured only really works on subjects where I am already an expert and know where I want to go next.
If I don't feel like I'm struggling, I don't feel like I'm learning. Hard, punishing learning is by far the best method for me to learn.
Your list will vary, but the points will help you create a guide for finding the absolute best learning paths for yourself in the many years to come in your career.
Education Is Just The Start
While education is one of many parts of this system, it is the one where you can decide an act just by deciding to do so. You need no one's permission, approval, or effort to make progress in the direction of your goal. If you wish to be a developer, no one can stop you from learning and creating the skills to become a developer. For the individuals building a non-traditional career, this is an important psychological barrier to traverse, because it signifies that you are creating your own path without asking the industry if it's okay.
In the next few lessons, we'll learn how to take the benefits of self-learning and education and use that knowledge to start building connections within the industry, find amazing opportunities, and eventually capstone these achievements for the rest of your career. I look forward to seeing you in the next article.