Are you weak in your 25-30-35-40-45 to sit down for training? Not corporate, not paid according to the “office pays” tariff, not forced and sometime not received higher education, but independent? Sit down at your desk with the books and textbooks you have chosen, in the face of a strict self and master what you need or want to master so much that you just don’t have the strength to live without this knowledge? This is perhaps one of the most complex intellectual processes of adult life: brains creak, time is short, everything distracts, and motivation is not always unambiguous. Self-education is an important element in the life of absolutely any professional, but it is associated with certain difficulties. Let's figure out how best to organize this process, so as not to drive yourself and get the result.
This is the last part of the cycle "Live and Learn":
Part 5. Self-education
Share your experience in the comments - maybe thanks to the efforts of the RUVDS team and Habr readers, the training will turn out to be a little more conscious, correct and fruitful.
What is self-education?
Self-education is self-motivated learning, during which you focus on obtaining the knowledge that you think you most need at the moment. Motivation can be completely different: career growth, a new promising job, the desire to learn something interesting for you, the desire to move into a new field, etc.
Self-education is possible at any stage of life: a student fanatically studies geography and buys all books and maps, a student immerses himself in the study of microcontroller programming and fills the apartment with incredible DIY things, an adult tries to “enter IT”, or finally get out of it and become cool designer, animator, photographer, etc. Fortunately, our world is quite open and self-education without a piece of paper can bring not only pleasure, but also income.
For the purposes of this article, we will consider the self-education of an adult working person - it's very cool: busy with work, family, friends and other attributes of adult life, people find time and start learning JavaScript, Python, neurolinguistics, photography or probability theory. Why, how, what will it give? Isn't it time for you to sit down for books (Internet, etc.)?
Black hole
Self-education, starting as a hobby, easily develops into a black hole and absorbs time, effort, money, occupies thoughts, distracts from work - because this is a motivated hobby. To avoid this situation, it is important to come to terms with yourself and your educational impulse even before starting to study with yourself.
- Designate the context of self-education - why did you decide to do this, what will you get in the end. Think carefully about how new information will be combined with your education and work, what practical benefits you will get from classes.
For example, you want to study psychology and are a fan of cars, which means you choose which books to buy, what to immerse yourself in, which university to go to for additional education in the future. Okay, we are trying to agree: if you delve into the car business, you can go to a car service or create your own. Cool! Do you have investments, a unique offer that will distinguish you from the rest, how will you work with competitors? Oh, you are purely to fix your car, well, it's interesting! And there is a garage, but you pull the injection engine to pick it up, but what about time? Isn't it easier to go to the service and watch the F1 race? Plan B is psychology. For myself? Not bad, in any case, it will pump soft skills. For the future? Quite - for the upbringing of their children or the organization of a career guidance office for adolescents and students, so that they do not get drunk on the market. Logical, profitable, reasonable.
- Set goals for self-education: what do you want to learn and why, what will this process give you for: pleasure, income, communication, career, family, etc. It will be great if the goals are not just outlined, but developed as a step-by-step learning plan.
- Be sure to indicate the boundaries of knowledge - how much information you have to master. Each subject, each narrow branch of knowledge has an immeasurable depth of study, and you can simply drown in information and attempts to grasp the immensity. Therefore, draw up a curriculum for yourself, which will indicate the subject areas you need, the boundaries of training, mandatory topics, sources of information. This can be done, for example, using the editor of cognitive maps (mind maps). Of course, you will deviate from this plan as you master the topic, but it will not allow you to fall into the depths of related information (for example, when studying Python, you suddenly decide to delve into mathematics, begin to delve into complex theorems, dive into the history of mathematics, etc. , and this will be a departure from the plan into a new interest - a true enemy of a person engaged in self-education).
The benefits of self-education
You can try new non-standard teaching methods: combine them, test, choose the most comfortable for yourself (reading, video lectures, notes, training for hours or intervals, etc.). In addition, you can easily change the curriculum if the technology changes (for example, ruthlessly quit C # and switch to Swift). You will always be relevant within the learning process.
Depth of learning - since there are no restrictions on the time of classroom work and the knowledge of the teacher, you can study the material from all sides, dwelling on those moments that you need. But be careful - you can dig into the information and thereby slow down the whole process (or even quit).
Self-education is inexpensive or even free. You pay for books (the most expensive part), for courses and lectures, for access to certain resources, and so on. In principle, education can be made completely free - you can find high-quality free materials on the Internet, but without books, the process will lose quality.
You can work with information at your own pace - write down, draw diagrams and graphs, return to already mastered material in order to deepen it, clarify unclear points and close gaps.
Developing self-discipline skills — you learn to organize your working and free time, negotiate with colleagues and family. Oddly enough, after a month of hard time management, there comes a moment when you realize that there is more time.
Cons of self-education
In Russian realities, the main disadvantage is the attitude of employers who require confirmation of your qualifications: real projects or educational documents. This does not mean that the company's management is bad and disloyal - it means that it has already encountered such "educated people" who escaped from trainings on how to earn a million in a day. Therefore, it is worth getting real project reviews (if you are a designer, advertiser, copywriter, etc.) or a good GitHub pet project that will clearly demonstrate your development skills. But it’s best to go to courses or to a university and get a certificate / diploma as a result of the self-educational process - alas, so far he has more faith than our knowledge.
Limited areas for self-education. There are many, many of them, but there are groups of specialties that cannot be mastered independently for work, and not “for oneself” and one’s own interest. These include all branches of medicine, motor transport and the transport sector in general, oddly enough - sales, many working specialties, engineering, etc. That is, you can master all the textbooks, standards, manuals, etc., but at the moment when you have to be ready for practical actions, you will find yourself a helpless amateur.
For example, you can know all anatomy, pharmacology, master all treatment protocols, understand diagnostic methods, learn to recognize diseases, read tests and even select a treatment plan for common pathologies, but as soon as you, God forbid, encounter a stroke in a person, with ascites, with PE - everything, the only thing you will be able to do is dial 03 with wet hands and drive away onlookers. You will even understand what happened, but you will not be able to help. Unless, of course, you are a sane person.
Little motivation. Yes, self-education is the most motivated type of learning at first, but in the future, your motivation will continue to depend only on you and your desire, and not on an alarm clock. This means that household chores, entertainment, processing, mood, etc. will become your motivation factor. Quite quickly, breaks begin, missed days and weeks, you may have to start studying again a couple of times. In order not to deviate from the planned plan, you need an iron will and self-discipline.
Difficulty concentrating. In general, the degree of concentration strongly depends on the place where you are going to practice. If you live with a family and they are not used to respecting your space and time, consider yourself out of luck - impulses for learning will quickly eat up your conscience, which will force you to help parents and play with children. For someone, my option is more suitable - to study in the office after work, but this requires the absence of chatty employees and the permission of the management (however, out of 4 times I never had to face a misunderstanding).
Be sure to organize your workplace and time - the atmosphere should be educational, businesslike, because in fact these are the same classes, but with a high level of self-confidence. Wouldn't it have occurred to you at the second highest to suddenly open YouTube or watch another part of a good series?
There is no tutor, mentor, no one corrects your mistakes, no one shows how easy it is to master the material. You can misunderstand some part of the material, and these erroneous judgments will be pulled further to give rise to a lot of problems in further learning. There are not so many ways out: the first is to double-check all dubious places in different sources until fully understood; the second is to find a mentor among friends or at work in order to be able to ask him questions. By the way, your study is not their headache, so formulate questions clearly and concisely in advance in order to get the correct answer and not kill someone else's time. And of course, in our time there is another option: ask questions on the Toaster, Quora, Stack Overflow, etc. This is a very good practice, which will allow you not only to find the truth, but also to appreciate different approaches to it.
Self-education does not end - you will be haunted by a feeling of incompleteness, lack of information. On the one hand, this will encourage you to study the issue even more deeply and become a pumped specialist, on the other hand, it can slow down development due to doubts about your own competence.
The advice is simple: once you understand the basics, look for ways to apply knowledge in practice (internships, your projects, company help, etc. - there are plenty of options). Thus, you will be able to evaluate the practical value of everything that you study, understand what is in demand by the market or a real project, and what is just a beautiful theory.
Have self-education important social nuance: you study outside the social environment and interaction with others is reduced to a minimum, achievements are not evaluated, there is no criticism and no encouragement, there is no competition. And if in mathematics and engineering this is for the best, then in the study of languages, “silence” and isolation are bad allies. In addition, studying by yourself delays deadlines and reduces the chances of getting a job in the field you are studying.
Sources for self-education
In general, self-education can take any form - you can cram the material in the evenings, you can interact with it at the first opportunity in every free minute, you can go to courses or get a second higher education and continuously deepen the knowledge gained there on your own. But there is a set, without which self-education is simply impossible - no matter what online schools, Skype teachers and coaches say.
Book. It doesn’t matter if you are studying psychology, anatomy, programming or tomato farming, books will not replace anything. You will need three types of books to study any field:
- Classic Basic Tutorial - boring and heavy, but with a good structure of information, a well-thought-out curriculum, correct definitions, wording and the right emphasis on basic things and some subtleties. (Although there are some interesting textbooks - for example, Schildt's excellent reference books on C / C ++).
- Harcore professional editions (like Stroustrup or Tanenbaum) - deep books that need to be read with a pencil, pen, notebook and a pack of stickers. Those publications that you need to understand and from which you will receive deep theoretical knowledge and the basics of practice.
- Scientific pop books on the topic (such as "Python for Dummies", "How the Brain Works", etc.) - books that are interesting to read, which are well remembered and in which the work of the most complex systems and categories is explained on the fingers. Be careful: in our times of rampant infogypsyism, you can run into charlatans in any field, so carefully read about the author - it’s better if he is a scientist from some university, a practitioner and preferably a foreign author, for some reason unknown to me, they write very cool, even in very good translations).
It is important to understand that there are areas where foreign authors are mostly completely useless, such as law and accounting. But in such areas (as, indeed, in others), one should not forget that any industry operates in the legal field and it would be nice to study basic legal acts. For example, if you decide to become a trader, it is not enough for you to install QUIK and take the BCS online course, it is important to study the legislation related to the circulation of securities, the website of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the tax and civil code. There you will find precise and concise answers to your questions. If you find it difficult to interpret, look for comments in periodicals and legal systems.
Notebook, pen. Write notes, even if you hate them and the computer is your friend. Firstly, you will remember the material better, and secondly, it is much easier and faster to refer to the material in your own way than to look for something in a book or video. Try not just to roll the text as it is, but structure the information: draw diagrams, develop icons for lists, a section marking system, and so on.
Pencil, stickers. Make notes in the margins of books and stick stickers on the pages you need, attributing a description of why you need to refer to this page. Greatly facilitates repeated appeal and improves memorization.
English. You may not speak it, but reading is highly recommended, especially if you are self-taught in the IT field. Now I really want to be a patriot, but many books are written much better than Russian ones - in the IT field, in stock exchange and brokerage, in economics and management, and even in medicine, biology and psychology. If the language is really a problem, look for a good translation - as a rule, these are books from large publishers. Originals can be purchased online and in print from Amazon.
Internet lectures — there are many of them on university websites, on YouTube, in profile groups on social networks, etc. Choose, listen, take notes, advise others - it is very difficult to choose an adequate course!
When it comes to programming, then your faithful assistants are Habr, Medium, Toaster, Stack Overflow, GitHub, as well as various projects for learning exactly how to write code like Codecademy, freeCodeCamp, Udemy, and so on.
Periodicals - try to find online and read specialized magazines to know how your industry lives, what kind of people are its leaders (as a rule, they write articles).
For the most stubborn stubborn, there is another superpower - free access to university classes. You negotiate with the faculty you need and sit quietly listening to lectures that you need or are interested in. To be honest, it’s scary to approach for the first time, rehearse your motivation at home, but they rarely refuse. But it takes a lot of free time.
General scheme of self-education
In our cycle, it has already been said more than once that the articles are rather subjective and the author does not pretend to be the ultimate truth. Therefore, I will share my working proven scheme for working on new information for the purposes of self-education.
Make a study plan — use the basic textbook(s) to make a plan and a rough schedule of the subjects you need. The fact is that sometimes you can’t get by with one discipline, you have to combine 2 or 3, in parallel you better understand their coherence and the logic of interaction.
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Select study materials and write them down in a plan: books, websites, videos, periodicals.
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Stop prepping for about a week - a very important period for which the information received during the preparation of the plan fits in your head, in the course of passive thinking, new ideas and needs for learning purposes arise, thus a cognitive and motivational basis appears.
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Start self-study on a convenient schedule - study at the set time and try not to miss "self-study". A habit, as they correctly write in the literature, is formed in 21 days. However, if you have a real overload at work, a cold, problems, postpone your studies for a few days - in a stressful situation, the material is absorbed worse, and the background of nervousness and irritation can be fixed as an association to the learning process.
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Combine materials - do not work with books, videos and other means sequentially, work in parallel, fix one with the other, find intersections and common logic. This will make it easier to remember, reduce learning time, and quickly show you exactly where your gaps and most advanced progress are.
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Take notes - Be sure to draw up notes and leaf through them at the end of work on each part of the material.
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Repeat past - scroll through your head, compare and link with new material, try in practice, if it exists (write code, write text, etc.).
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To practice
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Repeat 🙂
By the way, about practice. This is a very sensitive question for those who undertook to self-study not for fun, but for work. You must understand that by getting self-education in a new field, which is not related to your work, but is connected with a dream or desire to change jobs, you become not who you are reading this article, but an ordinary junior, practically an intern. And if you really want to change jobs, then remember that you will lose money and actually start from the beginning - for this you must have the resource. But once you have firmly decided, look for a job in a new profile as early as possible in order to learn and practice. And you know what? You will be hired with pleasure and not even at the lowest salary, because you already have commercial experience and those same soft skills behind you. However, remember that this is a risk.
In general, self-education should be constant - large blocks or micro-courses, because only in this way can you become a deep professional, and not just office plankton. Information is moving forward, do not lag behind.
What is your experience of self-education, what advice can you give to Khabrovites?
PS: And we are completing our series of posts on education “Live and Learn” and will soon start a new one. Next Friday you will know which one.
Source: habr.com