It never ends! Once again I’m going to write this from an I.T. perspective however, it’s a strategy and can be molded/adapted to any industry. In I.T. we don’t have a choice but to constantly learn. New phones, new switches, new routers, firewalls, software, etc etc etc. It’s almost every day that something new comes out.
There are two key pieces to this idea for me. First, we all have things to do during the day. Second, we all have a life outside of those daily tasks be that family events, kids sporting events, yard/house work, making dinner and doing dishes. You get what I mean. So how do we maintain this without giving all our friend/family time and hobbies up?
Well there is something I’ve went over before which is burning your lunch time learning/studying but I want to go a bit deeper. I’ll start with three terms I use (and my personal definitions).
- Ambient Learning: Background information. Think of this like listening to a podcast in the background.
- Learning by Osmosis: Watching someone who already knows do a task and soaking it in.
- Tactile Learning: Hands on learning performing a task.
So how do we utilize these? They all play well together to be honest. I’ll give you examples.
I shared an office as a route/switch network engineer with a lead voice/collaboration engineer. There was a lot of Ambient Learning just due to hearing him on the phone walking through things in his role. Be it end user or TAC cases with the vendor(s). Naturally I started to pick up terms/concepts/etc from just hearing it due to sharing an office.
This offered me the chance to ask questions and go shoulder surf him during a task and Learn by Osmosis watching him handle it. After a while, this lead to Tactile Learning. He gave me access to the system and would let me help him on common tickets (voicemail pin resets, directory number changes, etc). With that I still had the Learning by Osmosis on the other hand at my disposal sharing the office. If I wasn’t sure on something he’d either show me or walk me through it.
These tactics applied to other jobs as well getting to shadow my lead engineers in the sense of sitting in on meetings with them (Ambient Learning), Watching their process on tasks (Learning by Osmosis), and asking to take on tasks off their hands I was comfortable with (Tactile Learning).
How else can you utilize these concepts? A simple thing is to think of it like listening to a podcast/audio book on your drive to work. For me, I like to have webinars/youtube/podcasts/etc up in the background during my daily tasks. This is Ambient learning for me. I’ll naturally pick up things just hearing it in the background while still working on my tasks. Kind of like the things/sayings you pick up from your parents as you grow up. The benefit of doing this is if something perks up my ears I can either move back to the webinar and/or go to a recorded demonstration and take on the Learning by Osmosis idea. Think of that as watching your parents driving the car, you slowly absorb their actions and movements for said action.
That may go even further to where I end up trying it myself via either a lab environment or in certain scenarios a full on hands on mentored attempt at that task.
Every environment is different but I hope you can utilize these ideas as a way to keep moving forward during the day. Hopefully it can help give a bit of personal time back in your personal/family life. I realize some situations such as a call center/help desk/NOC role may restrict having something playing in the background due to the nature of the role but you can still leverage the idea while cooking dinner, doing dishes, mowing the lawn and so forth.
In summary I like to utilize this process:
- Ambient Learning: Something on in the background
- Learning by Osmosis: If something peaks my interest in hearing it, see it done
- Tactile Learning: If it sticks, go try it myself (lab, mentored/coached hands on)
