Educational Opportunities
When you want to learn, you need to find an approach that matches with your learning style. You must also connect what you learn to the appropriate types of intelligence, and you must do so within your schedule and budget. Sometimes options you'd prefer won't be available, and other times you may have a chance to learn something when you least expected — if you pay enough attention to take the opportunity.
Formal Education
Some people thrive in a formal atmosphere. Formal could mean a seminar, conference, class, or other setting with a teacher. In general, you'll have to show up at a specific place on a given date and time. There may be a combination of in-class work and assignments to complete on your own time. You can't as easily put things off until later, and the additional commitment can help you obtain more from the experience.
On the down side, one problem of seminars is the question of perspective and motivation. Why is an entity sponsoring a particular seminar? Some companies use seminars as a marketing tool. Their foremost intent is to ultimately sell you products or services for their own gain, not to advance your knowledge. A course based completely on the needs of the provider and not on the students is a waste of time.
Free sales seminars intended to showcase someone's expertise can be useful. Try to get a syllabus ahead of time and compare it to those of other courses as well as to tables of contents of books on the subject. If you see a preponderance of “Solving the problem with Acme's widgets,” you might think twice about attending.
The very need to show up at specific times can cause problems with your schedule and make it more difficult to spend the necessary time. Courses generally cost money — sometimes a lot — though you may be in a job that will defray at least some expenses if the topic is work-related. Classes also depend significantly on both the subject knowledge and teaching skill of the instructor, and that can be difficult to ascertain in advance. There are certified experts who couldn't reliably explain how to open a door. There is some chance that you could invest the time and money in a course, only to find it disappointing.
Online Courses
Web technology allows you to take courses online. Although not a panacea, distance learning is a powerful alternative to traditional classroombased instruction. Universities offer courses and even degree programs online.
There is a range of options associated with online courses. Some courses require you to log on at specific times to receive a lecture and to be able to ask questions of an instructor. Other approaches work asynchronously — you point a browser to a specific spot on the Web, where you read material and complete assignments according to your schedule. You can ask questions and get answers electronically, but there's no need for you and your instructor to be online at the same time.
While the results can be good, online courses do have their downsides. It's easy for many students to take advantage of the flexibility and find themselves hopelessly behind the pace of the class. It takes dedication and responsibility to commit to an online course.
Depending on the structure of the course, you can also interact with other students, which can add to the learning experience. However, an asynchronous format means you can't depend on having anyone getting back to you in a specific amount of time. If you leave questions on an assignment to the last minute, you may not get the answers you need until it's too late. Flexibility requires personal organization. Online courses also cost money and depend even more than traditional instruction on the communication abilities of the instructor.
Self-Instruction
There is a wealth of tools available to help people who want to advance their knowledge on their own time through their own efforts. You can find books, audio and video, Web-based tutorials, and computer-based training. Depending on the subject, you can also try the old-fashioned, get-your-handsdirty method by actually practicing, making mistakes, and trying again.
It's a romantic notion and a relatively inexpensive and convenient option. But be clear-headed when considering it. Gleaning knowledge from something fixed on the Web or on paper is trickier than working with an instructor in person. If an explanation makes no sense to you, you may not be able to explain your difficulty and ask for a different version. Because learning requires repeated and regular effort, you need sufficient self-discipline to make progress and not offer yourself the procrastinator's excuse that you'll get around to it eventually.
Environmental Instruction
Gathering information from people and situations around you is one of the most common forms of learning. You can benefit from mentoring, the expertise of those in your group and other parts of the organization, and even from being forced to work through events and problems that are new to you.
You'd think the desire to learn and support others with the same objective, is automatic, but it actually isn't. Before taking advantage of an opportunity, you have to recognize that it exists. Defensiveness about mistakes or an unwillingness to share power can keep leaders blind to the people and things around them.
Even when you know that you have an opportunity to learn, you need to treat it appropriately. The best lessons are those in which you try to extract as much general meaning and instruction as possible. Pointers on how to get more cooperation from the warehouse for a project, for instance, aren't just about that goal. You can make general observations and learn how to deal with that part of the organization in the future. You can also pick up on specific cues about how people doing that type of work react to situations and why they do so. When that happens, you have learned something that you can apply to many other organizations and even analogous situations. Now you're learning universal principles that let you plan and act more deeply and effectively.
