Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I recently found a pretty interesting discussion in one of the chats:

What is your behavior in learning?

Do you learn the things that you don’t know?

Or will you join a new course on the topic you know well but want to improve?

Let me share a few points and advices from my experience.

🔖 Bits of theory

  • 🖊️ Researchers say that people tend to practice skills they already know. Why? Because it is easy, and it feels like you are progressing and accomplishing a new badge after passing another course.

  • 🖊️ But to avoid such a situation, you need to remember that we learn only when we struggle with it. When we struggle while learning, we strengthen our connections in the brain. Yes, you will have a temptation to stop the practice because it’s hard. But that’s the natural learning process. So, to progress, you need to choose the weakest topics for you.

  • 🖊️ If you want to know whether you understand the topic, try explaining it to others. This can be a knowledge-sharing session or a talk at the conference.

  • 🖊️ You can also ask more non-obvious questions at the higher level of Bloom’s taxonomy: compare things one to another or evaluate a term under different conditions.

  • 🖊️ Not all knowledge is valuable - so you need to filter out it. You can try splitting it into procedures and concepts. Procedures - it is anything that we can describe as a sequence of clearly defined steps. It can be the configuration of a user before testing or implementing certain algorithms. These kinds of skills can be learned only by practicing them repeatedly. (If you need to master it).

  • 🖊️ Concepts are ideas or terms that require a higher-level understanding. So, instead of memorizing concepts, you need to understand them, find relationships with your current knowledge, and find ways to apply them in practice.

🤔 My practices for learning

  • 💡 Reflect. Reflect on which work tasks are more challenging for you than others. Where are my gaps in knowledge? Gaps can be in programming, testing, technology, product, or domain knowledge.

  • 💡 Visualize. Visualize gaps in a diagram or mind map to have a bigger picture of the learning landscape.

  • 💡 Prioritize. Choose the most high-priority topics and learn them separately. Focus on at most 1-2 topics at once for a certain amount of time (week, month).

  • 💡 Note-taking. I am making notes on almost everything: procedures, concepts, and meetings.

  • 💡 Track. Track your progress to fight impostor syndrome and to check your status. Write down things you learned: “Now, I can configure a user with a complex set of actions” or “Now, I know how to investigate logs in this particular sub-system.”

  • 💡 Evaluate. Evaluate yourself by implementing a practical project or continuously self-testing the learning topics.

As a conclusion

Looking at those steps, I would say that you need to treat learning as a project and behave like a project manager to plan, do, check, and act in the cycle.

Learning with struggle, building relationships between concepts, reflecting and evaluating - can make new knowledge valuable. Otherwise - it is just copy-pasting concepts from book to your notes (without understanding it).