5 Tips for Developing Technology Skills
As technology continues to evolve at an exponential pace, keeping technology skills sharp is more important than ever while it can simultaneously feel like an impossible race against lightning-speed change. How can busy adults find time to stay ahead of the times, and prioritize the skills that are most likely to impact their lives? Let’s investigate.
1. Start Somewhere
An old investment analogy notes that the best time to invest in the stock market is 30 years ago, but the next best time is now. Tech can easily feel like a realm for early adopters only, but slow or interrupted adoption will always beat none. Besides, enough people are intimidated enough to start that even if you wouldn’t know where to start looking at code or database structure, just the simple step of starting at the beginning puts you far ahead on the learning curve of those who have yet to start.
That also means that waiting until you know the exact right coding language or design program you want to focus on is probably a stall tactic that will hold back your progress. By and large, technology genres (coding languages, design platforms, AI models, etc.) are built on similar principles, so learning one flavor will give you the foundation you need if it turns out you should have started with Java instead of Python or Quark instead of Adobe.
2. Slow & Steady Wins The Race
It’s not entirely true to say that cramming doesn’t work. Who among us hasn’t pulled off a grade we didn’t quite deserve thanks to an all-nighter? But with tech skills your goal isn’t to ace a test and forget everything, but to build skills that will serve you well over time. So consistent development and practice is the key.
And that’s good news. Dropping everything to quickly learn something from scratch is daunting–and unnecessary. Finding an hour or two per week to make incremental progress is both more manageable and more valuable.
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3.It’s All About the “App”
At some point in your academic career, you undoubtedly said the phrase “when am I ever going to use this?” in the face of a lesson or study session. And, odds are, at some point years later you finally got your answer and wished you had been that much more focused when you first learned that subject.
Application is the key to making learning stick. When you pursue new skills that you can immediately apply to your job or life, your tech skills will soar quickly. Or if you’re getting ahead of new skills for the future, find or choose projects to immediately put those skills to use so that they stick with you for when you really do need them.
4. Compute Collaboratively
There’s a reason that tech is dominated by social media engagement and social proofing sales techniques: humans are a social species that enjoys collaborating, and we’re more committed when we feel camaraderie and accountability with others. So while there’s never been a better time for DIY, your goals are a lot more likely to become reality when you add a group component, such as group classes, regular meetings with a tutor, or organizing a friend group to self-study on the same schedule.
5. Embrace the Unknown
Socrates is often credited with the quote “true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing” (and true to form, though it sounds like something he probably said, there’s debate on whether he really said it at all). And while he was talking about a world 2400 years before Y2K, he may has well have been writing about tech, where the entire time you’re working to learn the latest and greatest, thousands of innovators are busy constructing an entirely new world that renders some of what you’re learning obsolete.
That’s the reality of the technological world: without a growth mindset that it’s okay to not know or understand, none of us will ever make any progress on the expanding learning curve. Learning technological skills is bound to be humbling–the Silicon Valley ethos is “fail fast” for a reason–so once you learn to live with the fact that you’ll make mistakes and feel foolish at times, you’ll be ready to build the skills that help you build the future.
