Poll: Ongoing professional self-education

[jducoeur]

I was reflecting today about how much work time I spend just *learning* stuff. As far as I'm concerned, that isn't optional: the programming business will happily steamroller you if you don't work hard to keep up with it, so I spend a considerable amount of time learning random programming languages and such, as well as the enormous amount I spend reading into new technologies for what I'm going to do next. (For instance, I spent nearly the entire past week teaching myself a new language and a new software package.) This leads me to be curious about how much time others spend in this. So let's have a poll!
[Poll #1310015]

Comments

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

I wasn't entirely sure how to answer #1. Mostly, I'll go for a few months just doing, and then have several days where I focus purely on learning new stuff. So I said "not much", but that may not be entirely accurate.

Part of the trick for me is figuring out where to *find* the information about improving my comic and its various tendrils in the first place ...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

New job requires >4% of work time as training as a condition of employment, and provides many in house classes to assist in this.

I consider this sort of thing to be personally one of my core job skills / tasks.

[jducoeur]

Good for them! Too many employers think of training as something that is entirely spare-time. I consider that idiotically short-sighted in the modern knowledge economy, and *especially* in software firms. At Convoq, I tended to try to force some occasional seminars into our schedule, strong-armed management to pay for folks to go to the SDBP conference, and so on.

I consider this sort of thing to be personally one of my core job skills / tasks.

Ditto. This poll was inspired by musing this morning about the fact that, as a Software Architect, I consider my morning surf to be an integral part of my job. Indeed, part of two jobs. The CEO is responsible for keeping up with industry news, and the Architect is responsible for keeping up with the technology.

So I officially spend 30-60 minutes just blog-reading and surfing each morning, separate from the constant research into whatever I'm integrating today (my life is Systems Integration, seemingly whether I like it or not) and the personal LJ stuff that gets squeezed into the cracks...

[rosinavs.livejournal.com]

With the two actuarial exams this year, I am definitely in the "more than 120 minutes per week" group, but that's likely true most years for me. I usually go to at least 1 professional conference a year, which is 90% learning for me, the AP Calculus Reading is at least 10% educational for me although most of it is plain work, and on average I do about an hour of research a week. I should be doing an hour a day, as one of my grad school profs thought, but I'm not working at a research university and he is. Most of this is entirely self-directed, unless you want to count the studying for the exams as directed since I was following a list of topics to cover, I was just doing it myself rather than taking a class or going by someone else's timeline for it.

I'm sure I'm not typical. My current career requires a great deal of further professional education, and my future career has a large frontload of it, as well as some continuing ed.

[fenicedautun.livejournal.com]

While I am required to do all sorts of on-line training for my job (mostly for security/regulatory/information protection stuff), I counted my weekly reading of the Economist, since I work for a bank and a thorough understanding of the current credit crisis means I don't seem like an idiot.

[laurion]

My job, almost explicitly, is to explore new technologies and to determine their suitability for use in pedagogy, and to train faculty in the use of these new technologies. Half of the approach, at least, is to explore on my own, and the other is to assess the instructors needs and then to find the tool that fills that need. I spend a fair amount of time exploring social networking, web 2.0, new media, etc. I do have standard 'doing' things to, like maintaining and supporting the course management and student enrollment systems, but much of the job is to be aware of what's out there, what the students are using, and to learn new things myself so the faculty don't need to spend as much of their energies doing it. I am a consolidated learner, spending my time discovering things so the faculty can spend more time on the things that matter.

[richenza.livejournal.com]

Not sure how accurate my average daily time is. Whenever I get bored at work, someone gives me a project which requires teaching myself a new skill. I'm currently learning MySQL, and there's hope in the IT department that I will learn Perl.

I'm a bit skeptical about that, since I haven't done anything like writing code since grade school. (I wrote a BASIC program that drew a butterfly.) Plus, current trend here is that learning happens when someone hands me an 800 page book and assumes that I will read it all eventually.

[baavgai.livejournal.com]

Daily time is tricky. I usually go on binges.

I'll work furiously on something for a few days to a few months, not really learning anything new. However, during those times I'll often surf up best practices and will occasionally take mini learning vacations looking into all I can find on a particular subject.

I'll treat myself at work by doing things that have nothing to do with work, like talking to a web service with vbscript, playing with a linux distro in a vmware machine, writing a maintenance script in Lua. It's me time, I can't imagine how it would relate to work and I don't bother.

However, more often than expected, there's a company benefit to such amusements. Quick scripting projects that need to be done now, now, now are sometimes done in a day because I once spent a week pissing around with completely non work related stuff.

The other day someone asked me about restoring a mysql database. We're a mostly MS shop, we don't use mysql. But at least one piece of software we use does and I was able to fix the problem without even opening a web browser.

[lisagw.livejournal.com]

This poll doesn't really reflect how I do PD (eduspeak for professional development). I regularly (weekly) spend a couple hours reading professional journals and other resources (print and on-line). Yearly, I participate in departmental, school-based, and district-wide PD (working out to 4-5 hours a month), but I also attend workshops, take related courses, go to conferences, etc. several times a year (probably 12-15 days per year). I also run trainings for others, mentor new teachers, and supervise student teachers (all of which require me to stay current with the field). As a Massachusetts licensed educator I have to do PD to earn a certain number of PDPs (professional development points) per 5-year period to retain my licensure.

Fuzziness

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I first answered "60-90 minutes", then changed it to "over two hours", because I decided that the programming language I've been hacking on for the past 6 months counts (since I'm having to teach myself more compiler development skills, I've had a compiler job in the past, and I'd love to have one in the future). It easily comes to two hours a day, since I hack on the train.

Aso, when I'm at work and waiting for the compiler and/or running regression tests, I usually read CS papers—sometimes on compilers, sometimes on Lisp, sometimes on completely unrelated stuff that just might be cool to play with someday.

And then there's grad school, with 2.5 hours in class, plus about 2-3 hours of reading and programming. I'm almost done with that, though—I'm on my last course, and only 2 classes to go.