#2 - Creating Your Self-Guided Learning Regimen: 3 Tips for Long-Term Success
How often have we told ourselves we should do something but never get around to it?
We’ve reached Installment #2, a small but significant milestone that means this humble newsletter is officially a thing now! Many thanks to all the dedicated community members who have decided to join me on this journey to explore all things learning. I’m so excited to see where this venture takes us in the weeks, months, and hopefully years ahead.
Here’s a quick roadmap outlining some of the topics coming down the pipeline (although this is an awkward time to use that cliché…)
Preview of Coming Attractions:
Is it really possible to learn a language through mobile apps and online tools? Stay tuned as I attempt to jumpstart my lapsed Spanish from high school/college and also try learning a second Romance language entirely from scratch.
What does Marie Kondo’s trademark “KonMari Method” have to do with work and learning? Although written and published just before the COVID-19 pandemic flipped the global workforce on its head, Kondo’s latest book on tidying up the office, “Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life,” has some valuable insights that can be applied to those burnt out by the remote work reality as well as workers who have already returned to a physical office building.
I’m preparing the first post in a multi-part series on my experience learning on Trailhead to elevate my role at my day job, develop new digital skills, and earn an industry-recognized digital credential in the process.
Be sure to hit the subscribe button if any of these topics strike your fancy and please leave a comment below to share any ideas or suggestions of your own.
And now for the main event:
Creating Your Self-Guided Learning Regimen: 3 Tips for Long-Term Success
How often have we told ourselves we should do something but never get around to it? We’re all generally pretty busy in our professional and personal lives; when faced with a hectic schedule, it’s often all too easy to de-prioritize work-related job training and save it for “when I have time” or “during a slow time at work” that never comes. Months or years pass and the thought of professional development is out of sight and out of mind, drowned beneath the voluminous, regenerating stacks of briefing memos, quarterly earnings reports, and PowerPoint presentations that consume our day-to-day.
We know that we should be learning and challenging ourselves. We’ve heard from experts that rejuvenating your portfolio with in-demand technical skills as well as interpersonal skills like public speaking and leadership could lead to improved job performance, more overall job satisfaction, and build a more resilient workforce less susceptible to replacement by automation.
We know this in the back of our minds, yet we often focus exclusively on the more urgent but mundane work tasks at hand instead of prioritizing important ones. These urgent tasks—checking email the second it comes in, replying to Slack notifications, joining a project meeting, etc.— have a more immediate payoff and are easier to rationalize than a long-term but worthwhile investment in learning. Scott Sonenshein refers to this as the urgency trap1.
Once you’ve been able to carve out the time, the desire, and the motivation for professional development, a little foresight when building your training regimen can make the difference between falling off the wagon one week into your program and maintaining a brisk pace toward the finish line. Having successfully “completed” a self-guided learning program of my own in Trailhead over the course of 14 months2, here are three tips that helped me overcome the initial hurdles to this kind of learning.
Start out small and stay focused. Don’t overwhelm yourself.
As discussed above, simply taking the affirmative first step to begin your learning journey is a feat in itself, but all that mental energy will be squandered if you end up quitting. Especially at the beginning of a self-guided learning program, the tidal wave of confusing new terminology, unfamiliar concepts, and simply the adjustment to a new style of learning can be overwhelming for the student. In the opening modules, you will likely fail or mess up a handful of times, and without a teacher’s explicit direction, it can be tempting to abandon the struggle altogether and retreat to the familiar comforts that feel like a better use of one’s time. Overcoming this temptation requires great discipline and is easier said than done.
My advice is to start small. Focus on establishing a steady learning routine in small, easy to digest sessions at first. If your goal is to become a chef, maybe an overly ambitious goal like cooking through Julia Child’s cookbook (524 recipes in 365 days) isn’t the best fit for a novice still learning how to dice an onion or poach an egg. Instead, start with a smaller, more manageable goal like trying one new recipe a week or practicing one new cooking technique every Thursday evening. In time, once you turn your learning into a habit and hone your skills, Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon will be within reach before you know it.
If you’re using an online learning platform like LinkedIn Learning or Trailhead, start with a small goal (like one learning module, one day a week) and dial up the intensity and frequency of your training only once you’ve proven it’s not too overwhelming. If your place of work allows you to train while “on the clock,” be sure to block out time on your work calendar and put up a Do Not Disturb message so colleagues know to respect your learning time. Having a concrete block of time on the calendar also doubles as an accountability tool to help ensure you will follow through with your planned session.
Set strong goals, but be honest with yourself about what’s realistic for your current situation.
In my experience, starting a new program without specific, strong goals in mind is a recipe for disaster. First, ask yourself what exactly are you hoping to get out of the program. For example, if you plan to study Mandarin on Rosetta Stone, what are you hoping to do when you exit? Is the purpose to engage in with China-based colleagues and business clients? Or maybe you’re planning to visit family and friends abroad and want to be able to immerse yourself in the culture? Establishing a broad overarching goal will serve as your compass throughout your learning journey.
Once you’ve set a broad goal, try setting a series of smaller goals over time that serve as stepping stones or checkpoints to your main objective. In the Mandarin business example, think of all the different things you would need to make a business meeting successful in a different language and unfamiliar culture. How does one properly greet and bid farewell in Mandarin? What do I need to know to carry a simple conversation with a new professional contact? If you plan on meeting clients at a business lunch, you should probably know the basics of ordering at a restaurant. It would also be a good idea to know the translations for any words or phrases pertaining to your specific industry to aid you in closing a deal. Will you need to send any emails or follow up communications in written Mandarin? If you find you aren’t reaching your sub goals over time, that may be a sign to re-evaluate your goals or your learning program isn’t delivering the skills you sought in the first place.
It can be difficult to strike the balance between an overly vague, unhelpful goal and one so narrowly tailored or too ambitious that it sets you up for failure. Try using the SMART goal framework (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based) when crafting your broad goal and its associated sub goals, but don’t overload yourself with too many goals at once.
Practice. Practice. Practice.
In a gamified learning platform like Trailhead or Duolingo, it can be tempting to rush through the content quickly in order to rack up experience points, earn new badges for your profile, and advance further in your course. Who doesn’t want to quickly advance to the next stage and be showered in virtual confetti in the process?
However, don’t forget to revisit your fundamentals and core concepts from the beginning of your course from time to time, whether it’s practicing your scales, conjugating verbs, or customizing page layouts in Salesforce. Internalizing core concepts like these will help solidify your learning and make it easier to advance to more complex topics later on in the course. Trailhead encourages you to try hands-on Projects and Superbadges to practice skills taught in the main coursework, while the Duolingo Stories feature allows you to practice listening and reading comprehension that often incorporates vocab from previous modules.
Once you establish a consistent training regimen, try and dedicate one block of time per week for learning new content and another for practicing core concepts you’ve already learned.
What do you find helpful to stay motivated? Please add your own suggestions in the comments and don’t forget to share with your fellow learning enthusiasts. Happy trailblazing!
For more on the urgency trap, see Chapter 5 of Marie Kondo and Scott Sonenshein’s “Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life.”
Learning is never truly “completed” on the Trailhead platform, as the developers are constantly adding new modules to try as the Salesforce platform evolves. However, I went from knowing zilch about Salesforce to becoming a Certified Administrator in about 14 months. I’ll paste a link to my blog post(s) on my Trailhead experience here when they go live in the future.