And what about you, when you are 25-30-35-40-45 years old, can't you sit down to study? Not corporate, not paid by the "office pays" rate, not forced and once under-received higher education, but independent? To sit down at your desk with books and textbooks of your choice, in front of a strict self and learn what you need or want to learn so much that you just do not have the strength to live without this knowledge? This is probably one of the most difficult intellectual processes of adulthood: brains creak, there is little time, everything distracts, and the motivation is not always unambiguous. Self-education is an important element in the life of absolutely any professional, but it comes with certain difficulties. Let's analyze how to better organize this process, so as not to drive yourself and get the result
Self-education
Share your experiences in the comments - perhaps thanks to the efforts of the RUVDS team and the readers of Khabra training will become a little more conscious, correct and fruitful.
What is self-education?
Self-education is self-motivated learning in which you focus on getting the knowledge that you think you need most at the moment. Motivation can be absolutely different: career growth, a new perspective work, desire to master something interesting to you, aspiration to go to a new sphere, etc.
Self-education is possible at any stage of life: a schoolboy fanatically studies geography and buys all the books and maps, a student immersed in the study of microcontroller programming and fills his apartment with DIY-objects, an adult is trying to "enter the IT", or finally get out of it and become a cool designer, animator, photographer, etc. Fortunately, our world is quite open and paperless self-education can bring not only pleasure, but also income.
For the purposes of our article we will consider self-education of an adult working person - because it is very cool: busy with work, family, friends and other attributes of adult life people find time and start learning JavaScript, Python, neurolinguistics, photography or probability theory. Why, how, and what does it accomplish? Isn't it time you got into books (Internet, etc.) too?
The Black Hole.
Self-education, once started as a hobby, easily grows into a black hole and consumes time, energy, funds, takes your mind, distracts from work - because it is a motivated hobby. To avoid this situation, it is important to negotiate with yourself and your educational impulse before you even begin to engage with yourself.
Identify the context of self-education - why you decided to do it, what you will get as a result. Think carefully about how the new information will fit in with your education and work, what practical benefits you will get from the classes.
For example, you want to study psychology and are fanatical about cars, which means you choose which books to procure, what to immerse yourself in, what university to go to for additional education in the future. Okay, we're trying to come to an agreement: if you go deep into car science, you can go into car service or create your own. Cool! And do you have an investment, a unique offering that will set you apart from the rest, how will you work with the competition? Oh you are purely to fix your car, well, that's interesting! Do you have a garage? Can you afford to work on your injector engine? Isn't it easier to go to the service and watch the F1 race? Plan B - psychology. For yourself? Not bad, it will improve your soft skills in any case. For the future? Quite - for the education of their children or the organization of office career guidance for teenagers and students, so they do not swallow crap on the market. Logical, profitable, reasonable.
Set goals for self-education: what you want to learn and for what purpose, what this process will give you for: pleasure, income, communication, career, family, etc. It would be great if the goals were not just outlined, but developed as a step-by-step learning plan.Be sure to indicate the boundaries of knowledge - how much information you have to master. Each subject, each narrow branch of knowledge has immeasurable depth of study, and you can simply drown in information and try to grasp the immensity. So make yourself a curriculum, which will indicate the subject areas you need, the boundaries of training, required topics, and sources of information. You can do this, for example, with the help of a cognitive map editor (mind maps). Of course, you will move away from this plan as you master the topics, but it will not allow you to fall into the depths of related information (for example, learning Python, you suddenly decide to delve into mathematics, begin to delve into complex theorems, dive into the history of mathematics, etc., and this will be a departure from the plan into a new interest - the true enemy of the person engaged in self-education).
Pros of self-education.
You can try new non-standard teaching methods: combine them, test them, choose the one you are most comfortable with (reading, video lectures, notes, studying for hours or intervals, etc.). Besides, you can easily change the training program if the technology changes (for example, ruthlessly abandon C# and move to Swift). You will always be relevant within the learning process.
Depth of learning - since there is no limit to class time and instructor knowledge, you can study the material from all angles, stopping at the points you need. But be careful - you can bury yourself in information and thus slow down the whole process (or even quit).
Self-education is inexpensive or even free. You pay for books (the most expensive part), for courses and lectures, for access to certain resources, etc. In principle, education can be made completely free - you can find quality free materials on the Internet, but without books the process will lose in quality.
You can work with information at your own pace - write it down, draw charts and graphs, go back to the material you have already mastered to deepen it, clarify unclear points and close gaps.
Self-discipline skills develop - you learn to organize your working and free time, to make arrangements with your colleagues and family. Oddly enough, after a month of strict time management, there comes a moment when you realize that you have more time.
The disadvantages of self-education
In Russian reality the main disadvantage is the attitude of employers who require proof of your qualifications: real projects or educational documents. This does not mean that the company management is bad and disloyal - it means that they have already encountered such "educators" who have run away from the training about how to earn a million in a day. Therefore, it is worth getting real feedback on the projects (if you are a designer, advertiser, copywriter, etc.) or a good pet project on GitHub, which will clearly demonstrate your development skills. But the best thing to do as a result of the self-education process is to take courses or go to college and get a certificate/diploma - alas, for now it is more believable than our knowledge.
Limited areas for self-education. There are many, very many, but there are groups of specialties that cannot be mastered on their own for work, not "for themselves" and their interest. These include all branches of medicine, motor transport and transport in general, oddly enough - sales, many working professions, engineering, etc. That is, you can master all the textbooks, standards, manuals, etc., but at the moment when you have to be ready for practical action, you will be a helpless dilettante.
For example, you can know all anatomy, pharmacology, master all treatment protocols, understand diagnostic methods, learn to recognize diseases, read tests and even select a treatment plan for common pathologies, but as soon as you, God forbid, are faced with a stroke in humans, with ascites, with TELA - all, the only thing you will be able, is a wet hands dial 03 and chase away gawkers. You'll even know what happened, but you won't be able to help. Unless, of course, you are a sane person.
Little motivation. Yes, self-education is the most motivating kind of learning at first, but later on your motivation will continue to depend only on you and your desire, not on the alarm clock. This means that the factor in your motivation will be household chores, entertainment, recycling, moods, etc. Pretty quickly you will start to take breaks, miss days and weeks, and may have to start studying all over again a couple of times. It takes an iron will and self-discipline to stay on track.
It's hard to concentrate. Generally, the degree of concentration depends a lot on where you're going to study. If you live with your family and they are not accustomed to respect your space and time, consider yourself unlucky - impulses to study will quickly eat your conscience, which will make you help your parents and play with the kids. For some people my option would be more suitable - to study in the office after work, but this requires a lack of chatty employees and the permission of management (however, I have never had to face misunderstanding out of 4 times).
Be sure to organize your workplace and time - the environment should be educational, businesslike, because it is essentially the same classes, but with a high level of confidence in yourself. It wouldn't occur to you to suddenly open YouTube or watch another installment of a good TV series at your second higher level, would it?
There is no tutor, no mentor, no one to correct your mistakes, no one to show you how to master the material more easily. You can misunderstand some part of the material, and these erroneous judgments will stretch further to create a lot of problems in further learning. There are not many ways out: the first is to double-check all the doubtful places in different sources until you fully understand; the second is to find a mentor among friends or at work to be able to ask him questions. By the way, your study is not their headache, so formulate your questions clearly and briefly in advance to get a correct answer and not to kill someone else's time. And of course, these days there is another option: ask questions on Toaster, Quora, Stack Overflow, etc. This is very good practice that will allow you not only to find the truth, but also to evaluate different approaches to it.
Self-education does not end - you will be haunted by a sense of incompleteness, a lack of information. On the one hand, this will stimulate you to study the question even more deeply and become a pumped-up specialist, on the other hand, it may hinder your development due to doubts about your own competence.
The advice is simple: once you understand the basics, look for ways to apply the knowledge in practice (internships, your own projects, company assistance, etc. - there are plenty of options). Thus, you will be able to assess the practical value of everything you study, you will understand what is in demand by the market or a real project, and what is just a beautiful theory.
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