How to learn anything?
Continuous Learning is required to keep yourself up to date with the latest market trends and helps us gain confidence in our career. It is always recommended to keep learning new skills, tools, and techniques that could help us to boost our knowledge.
In my 16+ years of career experience, I have kept myself updated with the latest market trends by learning new tools, techniques and the skills required to keep me up-to-date. In this blog I would be sharing my way of learning that I normally follow to learn anything.
Learning Cycle
I have termed the technique as “Learning Cycle”. It has helped me a lot in upgrading myself and kept me motivated to ask questions, deep dive into the concepts, read the books, articles, blogs and watch tutorial videos to clear the doubts arisen, finally equipping me with the required knowledge and skill.
This “Learning Cycle” explains my way of learning things, maybe, a programming language, an automation tool, learning about new techniques, learning Soft Skills, etc. This Learning cycle helps me a lot in grasping things out of the box.
How to learn anything?
To learn anything, the first and foremost thing is to have hunger for learning more. This self motivated desire should ask you to walk an extra mile in order to gain the knowledge that you want to achieve.
Start Learning a concept, go with the flow and try implementing it on your own, you will start facing a lot of challenges in the form of questions and your mind will be filled with doubts related to How, What, Why, When… etc.
Learn a Concept
It can be anything that excites you and you want to learn about it. It can be a programming language, a new tool, technique, learning about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, learning to cook, learning to drive, etc.
Books are the best source of knowledge to start with. Next, there are lots of free tutorial websites available over the internet that provides all the required knowledge for free. Though there are paid courses as well, it is your choice to select the tutorial or book that you want to learn from.
In my experience, YouTube provides a variety of free tutorial videos where the author shares his experience. I have learned a lot by watching YouTube videos and reading books.
Try to implement it on your own
After learning the concept through the books, articles, blogs, or video tutorials. It is necessary to try it on your own.
We humans have a tendency that unless we try something on our own, we do not remember how it works. Also, it gives us first hand experience and draws curiosity with multiple questions that tends to make us think about the different aspects of using the newly learned thing.
For example, if you have learned a new test automation tool, create a new project from scratch and try to implement some test scenarios on your own. I bet you will be amazed by the curiosity coming from within about how so and so things work, which method I should use for this test, how do I do that and so on. This curiosity will fill you with doubts and confusions.
Doubts and Confusions
The curiosity that arrives while implementing the learning will drive you through multiple questions, doubts and clarifications. It will arouse more interest to understand and learn the concept by deep diving into the advanced part or re-understand the basics as you are filled with lots of doubts.
It is better to write down all the doubts and questions and create a list before jumping into finding the answers. There are chances you may forget some questions when you start searching for the answers and this list will be handy for it.
Search for the answers
What, Why, When, How… and many such questions arise when you are filled with doubt and badly need clarifications and answers to it. The best place to look for the answers for the list of questions that you have created in the previous step is to check the documentation if you are working on technical stuff, or the book that you were reading, or the website from where you have taken the course.
YouTube videos, Community Blogs and articles can also be of great help here. You can also reach out to mentors and experienced professionals over LinkedIn and Twitter as they can act as a guide and show you the correct path.
You can also search for answers over Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, etc. However do not blindly follow the answer that these AI assistants provide you, make sure you do a bit of research before using it in your implementation.
It is also necessary to understand the answer that you get from AI Assistants, simply copy pasting things won’t help you learn the concept clearly.
Resolve the doubts
After searching the documentation, tutorials, guides, articles, blogs, YouTube videos,etc, for the answers to the doubts, there are 90% chances that your doubts will be all clear. Now it is the time to try the implementation and check if it is working.
This step will boost your confidence in self learning. It will also give you motivation that you can clear your doubts by self searching over the internet for the things that you feel you don’t know.
If I talk about technical implementations related to Test Automation tools and programming languages, there are many websites like GitHub, Stackoverflow, LinkedIn that provide valuable solutions.
Alternatively, there are related blog and articles websites like DZone, daily.dev, LambdaTest blogs, etc. that provide valuable content that the whole development and testing community benefits from.
Complete the implementation
This is the final step where you can complete the implementation and finish your learning. Completing this step should excite you and provide you with the much required knowledge as well as confidence.
It also opens the door to other learning stuff, like if you cleared the basic level, you should try to begin with the advanced level and so on. Similarly, you can also share your experience with the community about your learning.
Write a short story about your learning
This is an optional step however I would like you to focus on this step and share your learning journey by writing a short story about your learning explaining the following points in short:
- What made you learn the stuff?
- How did you go on and started learning?
- What challenges did you face while learning the stuff?
- How did you overcome the challenge?
- What mistakes did you make while learning?
- List of the websites, tutorial course, video, blogs, articles that you referred
- Learning Experience and outcome
Here is a Practical Guide to Blogging that I wrote some time back, it could guide you to write blogs efficiently.
This short story can be of great help to someone who is about to start his journey in the same field. It could help him/her a lot and learning from your experience he/she can choose the steps wisely to learn and grow. Medium, Hashnode, Dev.to, etc are some of the good websites to share your experience. Creating a YouTube video can also help you and from your learning others can also learn and benefit.
Keep Practicing
The journey doesn’t END here. It is required to keep practicing so you don’t forget what you have learnt. I have experienced that if we learn something and do not practice it over time, we forget it very soon. When time comes for the implementation or our job demands those skills again, we have to start from scratch again to learn it.
So it is important to keep practicing to keep the skills afresh.
Summary
Learning never stops as life never stops teaching. Hence, it should be noted that in every stage of life, for enhancing our knowledge we should keep learning.
In my experience, I have learned a lot and gained more experience by reading the books, documentation and checking out community groups, newsletters, tutorials and YouTube videos. Connecting over with the professional folks and mentors can prove beneficial and motivate you to keep learning.
Most importantly I would say, Practicing is what keeps you going!