Nature abhors a vacuum and if you’re sitting around not exercising your brain, it will be filled up with memes and other bollocks just like this:
I love memes, but it’s not productive (I’m not that kind of blogger). I am also uninterested at this time in learning big heavy subjects in another University course. They’re expensive and require special focus that can be difficult to maintain long term. So I’ve turned to other coursework and stumbled on Udemy (www.udemy.com). This isn’t a paid advertisement (sadly I have no commercial agreements with anyone) but merely an example of available products to keep the brain going.
So far I’ve completed a series of courses – on Wireshark, Sharepoint 2016, and MySQL. Several have been free and others have had massive discounts from the sale price. Whether it’s useful for my career as a qualification is not as important to me as the knowledge I’m picking up. There is some great stuff in there and some really solid presenters. I’ve laboured through a couple of the courses, but this is more a function of my learning than the course itself.
The real point is how important continuous learning is and that I think it should be a priority for everyone. There’s not point letting these big brains of ours atrophy and go nowhere after we finish school. If you’re stuck in a dead end job then learning is the way for you to find your way out of it. If you don’t enjoy your work then getting that brain going is a way to find a path to a new career and to maximise your existing job then trot out some relevant courses. Udemy has been a boon to me and I’m sure there are other great sites out there with similar offerings. A key thing to take away is this – once you start learning in a focused way and get started, keep going with other courses or books. It takes an effort to get your brain started on learning and it gets harder to restart as time goes on. Keep the momentum up and you’ll be far more efficient as you change from course to course. Viva la learning!
Angus' Blog 