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Amy Williams
Amy Williams

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How a learning plan has helped me grow.

I find it incredibly hard to stay up-to-date with technology rapidly changing, I always feel like I'm swimming upstream against a strong current just to try and stay afloat. Sometimes I feel like giving up and want a career change but I've decided to change my attitude, not focus at what I'm not good at and put a plan in place to become better.

I decided to put a learning plan together, I use Google docs and list all the things I currently don't know about web development. Some are very high level but it's a start. Here is a small preview of it, as currently it's 3 pages long.

Learning plan

Every week, I think about what I have planned and make an hour to do something on my list. So far, I've tried to be consistent and use Tuesdays after work. I call it #TechyTuesday.

To make it easier to learn, I set up a Codepen account where I can access at anytime and just write blogs and do little pens just to learn the things on my list. In the space of a couple of weeks I've learnt/created the following:

  • ES6 features such as default parameters, template literals, scoped variables
  • JSON objects and it's functions such as freeze, assign, create, keys
  • an animated bee all in CSS

By doing this I'm not only enhancing my skills technically but soft skills as well such as:

  • reading & documentation
  • understanding and finding quality documentation from MDN
  • debugging
  • using developer tools
  • using markdown

Best part of all, it feels really good obtaining more knowledge, sharing it and crossing it off the list.

So if you're inexperienced or experienced in web development, I recommend creating a plan in small manageable tasks and completing them on a weekly basis.

Does anyone else have a similar way of learning?

Latest comments (13)

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seesethcode profile image
Seth T.

Amy, great insight! Do you just make the learning plan based on interest, or a target goal of career skills?

I've wondered about (and may end up making) some career paths for beginner devs. There's so many shiny things out there, it can get overwhelming to a newbie :)

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desi profile image
Desi

This is great! What are the two columns on the right for? I'm working on making my "curriculum" a little neater, so I love seeing how other people organize their notes/thoughts/learning.

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csamywilliams_0 profile image
Amy Williams

Hi Desi,
The second column is for the week I plan to learn it in, I did try picking an exact date but it never happened so I thought I would put a week to learn that topic.

The third column is what dates I learnt them on to see if I have a "preferred" day to learning them, i.e. when I learn best. For example, I find that i'm more refreshed and motivated the start of the week but by Thursday / Friday i'm pretty worn out so I don't learn it that well.

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marek profile image
Marek Zaluski

Hi Amy, thanks for sharing this, I'm a big fan or making learning plans. I included your post in my video review of career insights of the week:

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csamywilliams_0 profile image
Amy Williams

Thank you Marek, I enjoyed watching your video it was very informative.

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taiwoakinnusoye profile image
Taiwo Akinnusoye

Can you please share the link to the google doc so it can be a guide for others

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csamywilliams_0 profile image
Amy Williams

Hi Taiwo,
I've created a blank one here: My learning path
Thank you,

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dylanesque profile image
Michael Caveney

This is very smart work. Not having this kind of granular plan when I first started learning development definitely slowed me down. I'm going to recommend to newer coders to follow Kamran Ahmed's Web Developer Roadmap, and I'm also going to be blogging about individual nodes on this, how to know when you're proficient enough in something to move on, etc. I really wish this had existed when I first started out.

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csamywilliams_0 profile image
Amy Williams

Hi Michael,
Thank you for the comment and the link to the Web Developer Roadmap, this will be really helpful flushing out more of my tasks on my learning path. I really appreciate it.

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao • Edited

That's awesome, I don't have anything similar to yours.

For me, it has been more of a theme of what I would like roughly do for the year and where do I get that knowledge to do it.

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csamywilliams_0 profile image
Amy Williams

Thank you, I did originally try to pick a topic and learn that but found it was really suited to my learning style so I personally needed to be a bit more specific. It seems to be working so far, I probably will most likely go to more themed topics when I get better.

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gustavofsantos profile image
Gustavo Santos

I organize my learning path in a way something like this. I've been using Google keep to write "flashcards" of things that I need to learn and a very directly documentation about what I already know. It works very well but recently my new job is stealing me a bunch of point of live

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csamywilliams_0 profile image
Amy Williams

That's a great idea of flashcards. I hadn't thought of something like, when you're satisfied with understanding them items, you can even then turn them into blog posts to look back at.