How to use your learning budget wisely
Method 1: Career path and progression
There are many methods you can use to figure out how to use your learning budget wisely. This post discusses using your career path and stage to determine where to focus your attention.
TLDR;
In most careers, there’s a simple rule of thumb that can help you figure out what to learn:
Early career, develop expertise
Mid career, develop breadth and depth
Later career, develop influence.
Early career
In the first few years of most careers, you’re still learning your craft - while you may have spent several years at uni learning the theory and knowledge, you’re still early in your practice. So you need to have a range of experiences applying your theory and knowledge to the kinds of problems that pop up in your industry. At this time in your career, it’s most useful to focus on developing expertise in your field. This means you need lots of opportunities to apply your knowledge to real problems, coupled with opportunities to keep developing your knowledge.
The best early career learning opportunities are specific to your industry - either on the job practice, or targeted short courses that teach you concrete skills like a new programming language, or how to solve the common problems that crop up all the time.
This is a time when it’s relatively easy to find out what else you could learn - you’re so new that there’s still lots of ground to cover! Ask people who have a few more years experience what they found helpful. Often the best advice comes from those who have done it recently, so find someone who’s just a bit better than you are, and find out how they got there.
Mid career
Once you’ve spent a few years learning your craft, things shift. You’ve spent the time practicing the things you learned at uni, and adding the industry specific knowledge and skills that make you a professional in your field. You’re probably not a master yet, but you’re not a newbie either.
Now is the time to become a T-shaped person. You’ve hopefully spent the first few years developing some depth (that’s the stem of the T), and now you need to keep developing that depth while also developing some breadth (the top of the T). This means that you now have two quite different approaches to learning: one aimed at further depth, and one at breadth.
To keep developing further depth, you need to tackle harder and harder problems. As you do this you will notice that it causes you to specialise - the more depth you gain in any field, the more you will become a specialist. To keep developing depth you’ll need to go and find the harder problems to solve - these problems don’t crop up as often as the common ones, so you need to look for them, ask about them and push to get involved in solving them. Reading is also extremely useful for developing depth - you should now have enough skill & knowledge to be able to read about the harder problems and understand what made that problem hard and how it was solved.
To develop breadth you need to seek out opportunities to collaborate with people outside of your field of expertise. Through working closely with people from different fields you will start to develop your understanding of fields that are adjacent to yours. For example, if you’re a software engineer, then seek out projects where you get to work directly with product designers, or data engineers. This will help you develop an understanding of what’s important in their fields and how what you do impacts on the work that they do.
At this point in your career, it’s also really useful to put some effort into making sure that your communication skills are well developed enough to support your collaboration with people outside your field. The further away from your own expertise that someone is, the less language and thought patterns you will share. This makes it harder to communicate effectively, so your skills need to be better.
At the mid career stage, it’s also really handy to put some effort into learning how to learn. At the early career stages, it’s pretty easy to figure out what to learn, and also easy to find others to help you learn it. But as you develop further depth, it’s harder to rely on others to teach you. There will be fewer people around who are ahead of you in the areas you want to grow into. So rather than lamenting the lack of mentors, why not take charge of your own learning journey? After all, you are the only person that will always be around when you want to learn something! To learn about how to learn concrete skills (the kind that will give you further depth), we recommend Barbara Oakley’s work. To learn about how to learn soft skills (the kind that will help you develop breadth) we recommend our growing from feedback and gathering effective feedback programs.
Later career
As you get beyond the mid career stage, you’ll likely find yourself faced with a choice: To become a people leader; or to become a specialist individual contributor.
Becoming a technical specialist
Thankfully, it is becoming increasingly possible to work in a company that does not equate career progression with people leadership. So, if you’re pretty sure that you don’t want to become a people leader, then you’ll definitely want to seek out those companies that offer a dual career path model.
If you’re wanting to head down the specialist individual contributor path, then becoming a true technical expert is your task. This is an extension of becoming a T-shaped person. You can think of it as extending the trunk of your T as much as possible - lengthening it to get greater depth, but also thickening it to extend your skills into the domains adjacent. This increased skillset will mean you are able to solve harder and harder problems, and be better and better at working with those around you.
To continue developing the trunk of your T, you’ll need to keep seeking out the hardest problems and figuring out how to solve them. As you get better and better you will find that your learning is not just about learning from what others have figured out - you’ll also need to start creating new knowledge. Solving problems that no-one has solved before. You’ll need to switch your attention to developing your creativity, this is why it’s useful to thicken the trunk of your T (as well as lengthen it). Spreading your skills into other disciplines will give you ideas for how to apply the skills you have in different ways, as well as give you the problem solving patterns and thinking tools of other disciplines.
As you continue to develop your technical expertise, it pays to also keep an eye on developing your soft skills enough that they don’t hold you back. You’ll need to be able to communicate effectively enough to collaborate, but also to be able to influence and convince others when you need resources, or to bring people into your ideas. If you want to be able to target your soft skills learning to focus on the things that will give you the most benefit, we suggest learning how to gather effective feedback and grow from it. This will allow you to continuously understand what’s working for you and what’s holding you back.
Becoming a people leader
Alternatively, you might be interested in developing your people leadership skills. If you’re considering people leadership (or you’re already doing it) you’ll pretty quickly figure out that your technical chops aren’t enough. When you become a people leader your job becomes all about how to help other people get great work done. Other people are doing all the ‘real work’. It’s your job to help them do it better. This is fundamentally different from doing the work yourself and requires a serious upgrade in your soft skills.
Empathy, communication, influence, organising things, teaching, managing emotions, setting goals, following up, delegating, and more. All of these things become your work, and while you need your technical skills to be able to do these things for others in your field, you’ll find that the work you do doesn’t feel the same anymore. For many people this transition is tough. You go from being great at your individual contributor job, to feeling totally out of your depth as a manager of people who do your old job. The reason you feel out of your depth is because all of a sudden the skills you need are really different.
As a people leader you need to focus on extending the top of the T - your ability to work effectively across disciplines. To do this you need to learn a bit about the other disciplines, and you also need to develop your soft skills.
The trickiest thing about developing your soft skills is that you need opportunities to practice when it’s safe to fail. If you fail when you’re learning to code, or use a spreadsheet, nobody gets hurt. But when you fail when you’re learning to give feedback, or diffuse a difficult situation, then someone probably does get hurt. And while a spreadsheet won’t remember that you stuffed it up last time, your team member will absolutely remember.
Because of this, lots of people end up failing to learn the skills required to lead. Either they fear failure so much that they avoid trying; or they try and fail, but no-one tells them where they went wrong so they struggle to improve.
This is why we strongly recommend seeking out soft skills training that uses a teaching method that includes lots of opportunities to practice. By practicing in a training environment you will be able to get really helpful feedback to help you understand what’s working and what else you could try. And you get to practice on other people who are also learning (and ideally, they are not your team members) which means they are less likely to get hurt in the process.
All our training programs are designed to maximise the time you get to spend practicing new skills in a feedback rich environment.
We recommend starting with the Magic Triad training - an introduction to the three core skills of leadership. As a leader you need to do three things:
Warmth: Bring people with you and keep them safe
Competence: Have the knowledge and skills to figure out what to do
Power: Have the courage, grit and drive to get it done.
When you can do all three things well, and apply the right amount of each for the situation at hand, everything gets easier. It’s like magic.
You can read more about the Magic Triad here. Or check out the rest of our programs here.
