How You Should Learn Technology in the Information Age, Part 2

byLawalAremu

404 followers

Updated 5 years ago

. . . continued from How You Should Learn Technology in the Information Age, Part 1.

The Skills Track

Have you ever met someone who seems to know everything but can't actually do anything?

Learning to actually do things is what the skills track is all about. Before I joined the Wealthy Affiliate, I started working part time as an engineer after the summer of my sophomore year in college and it became quickly clear to me that I was learning as much at work as I was at school.

Not only was I picking up the specific information that related to my company's products, I was learning how to do things. I had to design circuits using real parts, not the theoretical devices from classroom examples.

I had to consider issues like price availability and lead time. That almost never came up in class. I had to document my work not for a graded report, but according to the company standards. I had to build it, debug it and it had to work, not because I needed to get a grade, but because it was my job to make it work.

It became clear to me that my school was doing a great job teaching fundamentals and even some information, but real skills you gained on the job and in fact it was knowledge that new grads didn't really know anything useful, that it was up to companies to give them the skills they needed to get the job done.

I once had the experience of working with an engineer with a graduate degree. At first I was somewhat intimidated having just a couple of bachelor degrees and being younger and less experienced.

His project ran into trouble and I was asked to take a look and see if I could help. I started digging into the design and was horrified at what I found. The guy had designed a product that in theory might've worked but could not work in the real world using real parts. It was fundamentally flawed at the architectural level and needed to be completely redesigned.

He had plenty of knowledge and information, but did not have the skills to translate them into reality. In a world where knowledge and information are both inexpensive and widely accessible, the value of skills has grown.

The longevity of skills varies depending on the skill and the knowledge on which it is based. Knowing how to wire up a network cable or interpret the contents of a TCP packet is based on fundamental knowledge so those skills can last a long time.

Being an expert on visual studio 2010 was a skill that lasted about two years. Then those who wanted to maintain their skills had to study the new features of visual studio 2012 then visual studio 2013 and so on.

The key thing to remember from a career perspective is this:

Fundamental knowledge is the foundation that helps you understand and digest information. Information is the specific knowledge that you need to solve problems. Skills represent the ability to implement solutions using your knowledge.

As you increase your level of expertise on the skills track, you can come up with better solutions and implement them more quickly with less chance of mistakes along the way.

In most cases, it is the skills that generate income. People pay you to do things not to know things.

The Innovation Track

I was originally planning to call the innovator track the expert's track, but I came to realize that the term expert is itself confusing and misleading. I mean, what is an expert really?

What is An Expert?

I myself have often described an expert as someone who has a really good understanding of fundamentals, but that's really a reaction to the fact that so many so called experts don't. So let's take a quick look at what the progression from beginner to expert looks like on each of the tracks I've described so far.

The Beginner Level

Every one starts out as a beginner knowing nothing. If you're lucky, you have some understanding of another field that is similar enough so that some of the concepts carry over, but it's always a struggle to start out because beginners don't even speak the language of the domain. TCP OOP GPU are cryptic acronyms and because the explanations of a technology sometimes don't explain the terminology, it's twice as hard to make progress because you don't even understand the explanations.

On on the skills track, you may even lack the most basic knowledge. How do you find that specific configuration page the documentation says you need to use? What is a variable? Where is the on/off switch?

As you progress, you start to speak the language so you can understand the documentation and follow tutorials. You can read and understand sample code. You may even be able to follow specifications, references and product manuals, and that's good because at this level. You have to refer to them constantly. You can solve problems but it is very slow and you make many mistakes along the way. You get stuck often.

The Competence Level

Next you reach a level of competence. You understand the basic concepts and are constantly refining your knowledge of fundamentals. You can effectively use search to gather additional information as needed and you can solve most problems in a timely manner. You rarely get stuck.

This is where most good technologists spend most of their time. So what comes after competence? Let's call that expertise.

The Expertise Level

Experts can solve virtually any problem that is solvable. They have access to the fundamental knowledge, information and skills needed to accomplish that, but let's take a closer look at that statement. Experts can solve virtually any problem that is solvable. That also means that part of being an expert is identifying problems that cannot be solved, and understanding why they cannot be solved.

Experts have access to the fundamental knowledge, information and skills. I didn't say they themselves have the necessary knowledge and skills or even that they can find it. Access is much broader than that. If an expert can't find what they need, they create it.

Isaac Asimov wrote a great short story once called "Profession", about a world where everyone learns both information and skills through a form of hypnosis.

The knowledge is imprinted directly on their brains, but the story asks an interesting question. Where does the knowledge come from? Who makes the knowledge tapes? True experts are innovators. They're the ones who discover or invent the fundamental concepts, write the blogs, the books and the articles, and figure out the best way to do things.

They create knowledge, they invent solutions, they define best practices. The innovator track is really part of each of the other tracks representing the journey beyond competence.

Maximizing Values

Expertise is almost always narrow and is often fleeting. I was once an expert in visual basic 6. That is no longer true and it wouldn't matter if I was because few people care anymore about that technology.

I was once an expert on .net development and while I remain competent in many aspects of that technology, I am no longer an expert. I am currently an expert in software development using the apex language on a platform called force.com but I'm competent in a wide range of technologies and routinely used several other languages and platforms on a daily basis.

There is a natural tendency to want to become an expert, but it turns out that this is rarely the best learning strategy. Learning is fun or should be, and if you want to learn something because you are excited about it and want to learn everything you can about it.

Please don't let anything I say discourage you. Right now, I want to talk about learning from a career and value perspective or put another way, maximizing the financial returns from the effort you put into learning technology.

Let's start at the beginning.

Being a beginner rarely pays well regardless of what track you are looking at. It is a necessary first step towards competence, but beginners are slow and make mistakes and the supply of beginners is generally large.

The law of supply and demand comes into play. Low quality with high supply results in low wages unless demand is truly extraordinary. You can get jobs as a beginner, in that companies often recognize that they will need to train people so they may hire someone without the skills they need but who have other characteristics that they care about.

This is especially true when there are not enough competent people to go around. Companies hire new graduates, knowing full well that they probably don't have the skills needed for the job based on a belief that they will learn quickly, especially if they have strong knowledge of fundamentals.

That's why companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook hire heavily out of top computer science schools. They know that while those students may lack skills, they will have significant competence on the fundamentals track and may be strong on the information track as well.

Competence is where the professionals play. If you have a decent knowledge of the fundamentals, the ability to seek out and understand information quickly as needed and a broad skillset, you can efficiently solve problems using a wide variety of tools and technologies.

Having competence in a variety of technologies is particularly valuable today where much of software development involves integration of different technologies. It also offers a high degree of job security in that your skills can qualify you for a wide variety of possible jobs.

In other words, competence pays. Reaching a level of competence on the fundamentals, information and skills track for a particular technology is the most efficient way to maximize your income from solving problems using that technology.

But what about expertise? Believe it or not, gaining expertise in an area is rarely the best use of your time from a financial perspective. That may seem counterintuitive, but hear me out.

First, think of it from a company's perspective. If a beginner can do a particular job, would they spend more money to hire someone more experienced? Maybe, maybe not. Companies hire competent individuals because they can get the job done where others can't.

Now, if competent individuals can solve 95% of all technology problems, which may be an understatement, does it make any sense for a company to hire experts at a greater price? Sometimes it does say to work on an area that is core to the company's success. And sometimes it's good to have an expert around just in case, but you rarely need a whole team of experts.

Even if you could find them, those experts aren't necessarily paid that much better than those who are just competent. So why become an expert? You may not get paid significantly more. And once you become an expert, you have to work really hard to stay an expert.

Being an expert is hard work. Understanding information that exists is much easier than the kind of digging and experimentation that it takes to create new information. And the time it takes to gain and maintain expertise on a subject is time you don't have to become competent in other technologies.

Now there are particular career strategies where it does make financial sense to gain expertise. If you want to be an author or speak at conferences, becoming an expert is an effective way to start.

Independent consultants can often benefit from having areas of expertise. Sometimes companies really do need an expert to solve a problem and will pay a lot to borrow one for a while. But the truth is that many experts become so not out of strategic choice but by accident as they work on a technology that they are passionate about, and it is not my intent to discourage that.

It's exactly what happened to me with force.com my real point here is to convey that you should not feel the need to go beyond competence unless there is good reason. That being competent in a technology is good enough and once you reach that point it is often just as good or better to switch over and learn a new technology than to continue on the path to expertise and innovation.

To be continued soon...