Never stop learning

When you’re straight out of college or university, it’s unquestionable that you must learn after starting your first job. But for how long do you have to learn? When will the time come when you can just lean back, “do your job”, give advices, mentor, etc? Will it ever come?

I once thought “I’ve learned enough”. After spending ~16 years in IT, I had done database/C++/Java programming, mobile and enterprise software development, was developer, tester, dev lead and architect on multinational projects, mentored colleagues, helped them grow, participated in getting new people on board both on projects and at the company … you name it. Generally, I thought it was time for me to have some rest and share experiences.

Certainly, I could have done that. I do share experience ever since, but I could never lean back – and it’s for internal reasons. No matter how exhausted I might have become on a project, after taking 1 or 2 weeks of rest my mind starts working again: what’s next, what will you do now, what lessons can you draw, what new can you learn, can you share anything with people so that they don’t have to learn the hard way?

One way for me to learn is attending conferences. An advantage of the pandemic is that since we can’t travel, conferences go online – cheaper. I’m a keen visitor of conferences and happy to meet people, but since the cost structure of hosting a conference has drastically changed, we may afford conferences that we previously couldn’t. For me, attending a conference gives professional growth, emotional re-fill and generally it’s an inspiration to move further from the current status quo.

I firmly believe that one must not stop learning, ever. Not only in IT, but in general. We simply cannot afford it, for multiple reasons:

• Thanks for globalization, we can learn from truly global experiences. If you don’t do it, you’ll drop behind.
• With the coming age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), life will transform dramatically. My relatives (from non-IT world) don’t believe me that it will ever come soon, but we’re experiencing exponential growth here. I don’t fear of losing job, life will simply transform as to what people will do. If you don’t adapt, you’ll be surprised.
• If you solely rely on what your current job/company gives you, you may be the best worker – for them. But what about you? What are YOUR ambitions, what is YOUR plan?

You know, we’ve been doing some experiments lately: gave everyone access to an online course platform in the team. We thought it would unleash self-learning. Well, it kind of did, but most folks don’t live with it. Why? I believe it’s because motivation must come from inside, you cannot force it externally. You can certainly prescribe some mandatory trainings, if they’re required for your project, but that will not be one’s customized answer for his/her own needs. Companies cannot and will not give the answer to all your needs, but you must think through what you want (to become), make a plan and work towards it.

My advice, thus, to my kids and everyone who’s interested is unsurprisingly: never stop learning and be flexible to adapt. Change is the keyword of the future and this is the best way to prepare for it.

All the best,

Gabor