Category: Lifestyle

Learning from work experience vs self-studying

I’ve share in one of my articles that is is estimated that only 10% of the learning happens a the formal training. The remaining 90% comes from everyday-tasks and learning from coworkers. Formal training includes things like self-studying from online resources which I would like to emphasis in this article. Since it’s only 10%, can it be treated with low priority?

Self study – 10% of the time

I do not know how those numbers were calculated. I’ve seen those numbers in on of the managers training. In my opinion those numbers can be quite accurate when we think about the time that we are able to spend on learning. Most of the time we spend at work and this is where we have the biggest opportunity to learn. Work builds real experience and practice. The knowledge becomes not just theoretical but also tested in real-life. We are able to come up with our own use-cases, examples and experience practical challenges.

Studying vs practicing vs teaching

When we think about the levels of knowledge it may be illustrated as: student → practitioner → teacher. Self-study brings you only to a student level. Good courses include hands-on labs, so that you can experience also some practice. But training exercises are always simplified and cover only simple “happy paths”. They do not include production-level challenges. It’s like fight with a shadow vs fight with a real opponent in martial arts.

Self-study – the impact

But does it mean that self-study can be ignored as it contributes only 10% to your learning? Absolutely not. It’s 10% in terms of the time but can be much more in terms of the impact. We do not always have the comfort to learn new things at work. Especially when you are an architect or in general technical lead, your company expects that you are the one who teaches others, who knows the new trends and who is up to date with latest technologies. You have to do a lot of self-study so that the whole company does not settle down with old solutions.

Online resources for self-studying

I was recently writing about DNA program which is a great example of self studying materials for software architects. Recently I’ve also singed-up for Google Cloud Platform Architecture training with Coursera. After doing the first module and getting this certificate I can definitely recommend Coursera GCP trainings. The best thing is that the training include a lot of hands-on labs with real GCP resources provisioned via Qwiklabs platform.

I have to admit that the online training possibilities that we have now are amazing. For a small price you can have access to resources that are often of much better quality than (unfortunately) some lectures at stationary universities.

Summary

So, go and self-study! Then use it at work and build a better world 🙂

Technology and business

I’d like to share 2 sentences which came to my mind this evening…

1. Business is easy to understand but hard to master

So many business coaches, so many books and success stories. They say: just do it! But in practice it’s so hard to build your own product which would earn 1 little dollar a day.

2. Technology is hard to understand but easy to master

Technology is often abstract or complicated. A lot of jargon around it. It’s not easy to understand that jargon without being a part of it. On the other hand the rules are simple. You have the specs, the docs, just learn it and it’s almost guaranteed that it will work if you follow the instructions carefully. Everything is predictable and well defined – totally not like in business.

Where do I see myself?

I understand business, but I do not master it. I understand technology and master significant areas of it. In my professional journey I am looking for environments when I can work closely with business and people who master it. My role is to add value by managing and building technical solutions supporting given business model.