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Personal Education System

This April, I have a public speech for students of my alma mater faculty. I was talking about education after bachelor or masters degree. I’ve added details to the presentation and adapted it into this article.

First, I will share the motivation for continuous education. Then I will explain how my learning system is structured. Next, I’ll go through the most common sources I use myself:

Finally, I will discuss what is not included in this system but can be added. Along the way, I will comment on how to use this in your own learning system.

Continuous education

We’re already learning something all the time

Even stuck in TikTok for an hour, we can learn something new and apply it. Our grandparents today are learning how to receive their pension on a bank card or how to schedule a doctor’s appointment online. In our old age, we will be learning how to patch some implant drivers using Neuralink. This is the reality in which we live. We have to adapt.

Both process and result improve our lives

Even if you’re mastering your skills to dominate the mid lane in Dota 2, you’ll notice an improvement in your gameplay, owning victories and elevating your self-esteem. Let’s look deeper at the possible benefits of learning in general:

  1. Social Connections. Learning leads to entering new communities, where you meet fellow enthusiasts. Together you exchange techniques and ideas, feedback and achievements, support each other to keep up learning the subject. That encourages development and growth and could help making a couple of new friends.
  2. Career Growth. As you expand your knowledge and expertise in the subject, you become more valuable at the labor market. Mastering the professional skills opens up new career opportunities and total compensation boost. Employers are also drawn to candidates who adapts to the industry trends.
  3. Improved Self-esteem. Success in learning leads to successful problem solving, which causes positive reinforcement. After all, you start to feel more satisfied and confident, which helps you to go on.
  4. Skills application. When gaining new skill or mastery, you start to apply them to gain extra value for yourself or someone you’re serving.

Okay, as we learn continuously and the learining itselft profits our lives, how to unleash the full potential?

Education system

I believe that maximising the learning output can be achieved through purposeful and regular practice. However, I should note that it’s not mandatory; even learning occasionally following bare interest is far better than not learning at all.

I think it’s appropriate to draw an analogy with athletes’ training sessions. Engaging in any training already benefits the body more than simply being physically inactive. Professionals though alternate between different exercises, compile them into a program, and pursue a specific goal they aim to achieve through these workouts.

Let me explain how this works for me.

System fundamentals

My system on a scheme

I follow systematic learning. Subjectively, my system feels quite relaxed. In short, it can be described as follows: at any given time, I’m either taking a course, attending a training session, or reading non-fiction. When I finish, I take a couple of weeks to rest and then move on to something new. I keep lists of what I’ve accomplished and what I haven’t, along with comments, to make it easier to choose what to pick up next. Also I surround myself with sources of situational learning so I always have something to switch to.

Let’s discuss how to design a similar system for yourself. We’re all different, so it’s important to set the goal, choose the pace and combine different sources. Without quality sources, learning could be dissappointing. Without regularity, learning may be purposeful but not systematic. Without goals, learning becomes random.

Goals and purpose

I’m interested in several categories of fields:

  1. Modern Management and Specific Technologies. This is related to my professional development as either an engineering manager or head of engineering. I aim to deepen my expertise in this area.

  2. Product Management, UI Design, Editing, and Psychology. These are either adjacent to my main specialty or meta-skills that are universally beneficial and will be useful in any role.

  3. Entrepreneurship and Philosophy. These are areas of interest to me or ones I believe are worth investing my resources in. The first helps me understand business needs, while the second helps me become a better person. At least, that’s what I believe.

Also I try to learn something new in sports, nutrition and history, but it’s more like occasional learning so I’m not considering this any further in this article.

In the fields above I try to become better daily. They are sorted by importance to ease my choices. First, I look for challenges facing in the nearest future. Second, I seek for opportunities opened for a limited time: like a course with close start date.

I don’t have some global prioritization. You know, like “I want to become VP of Engineering at Microsoft in 10 years” and then describe the difference between now and then, break it into the steps to close the gap — nothing like this. There are several reasons:

Also I don’t follow any numeric goals. I believe that quality matters more, if you dedicate enough time. The numbers could be useful to compare yourself against yourself, but that’s all.

Maybe this isn’t the best path among the possibilities, but it suits me fine. If you’re used to these or some other goal mechanics or frameworks like SMART and they work for you, use them to set the goals as usual.

Pace

How my pace changed over the years

Each person’s pace is unique and constantly changing. That’s normal. To determine yours, just start. Listen to yourself, give yourself breaks, but also try to learn regularly. It’s a matter of balance, that comes with experience.

I’m not a fan of quantifying pace in numbers per year — like reading N books and taking K courses — because these things vary greatly in terms of difficulty to master. But some find it helpful to do so, and it might work for you too.

I don’t strictly count the time spent on learning for some period, nor control upcoming load. I just try to dedicate at least 10 hours a week to my learning activities. It’s not that much out of the 100 hours of free time excluding eating and sleeping. And I have enough time left to work, travel, spend time with loved ones, attend concerts, do sports, play video games and try something new.

I know that it might be helpful to book some timeslots on the calendar, dedicated to learning only. For example, an hour each workday before the work and couple of hours each weekend. Or make some advanced learning timetable. I follow “as it goes” mode, when I add to my calendar only time bound events and deadlines.

All of these methods can potentially be useful to set the pace, so consider giving them a try.

Approaches

This refers to how different sources are combined and what happens in the system besides directly absorbing material.

  1. Alternating Sources. Switching between different learning sources keeps things fresh and prevents burnout.
  2. Writing summaries. Taking notes or creating summaries helps reinforce learning and provides quick reference material.
  3. Making reviews. Regularly revisiting previously learned material strengthens understanding and keeps the skills or knowledges relevant.
  4. Applying in practice. Applying what you’ve learned in real-world scenarios serves as a repetition but also helps you to gain feedback or find gaps you still have to master.

Books

My nerd book log and backlog

Let’s talk about learning sources. The most obvious one is non-fiction books. Here’s what my list looks like, which I’ve been maintaining since 2017. I highly recommend starting with two books: one on self-management and the other on your professional area.

As a self-management book I can recommend Jedi Techniques for russian-speaking readers and Atomic Habits for everyone else. These books help you to kick-off your personal productivity. What about professional books, I know a couple to start:

I don’t know good starting books in other professional areas, but you can survey a few fellows, read posts from industry experts, ask ChatGPT, and choose the most popular option. Read it, and then either move on to the next popular choice or explore the recommended sources, similar publications, or additional reading mentioned in the book. You’ll be hooked before you’ll even know it — congratulations!

Courses, workshops and trainings

There are courses about professions and those about skills. Some are corporate, or with an initial screening process, while others are open. There are paid and free options.

Tier-1 companies value their reputation a lot, so their courses should be fine, it’s nearly guaranteed.

If it’s a course produced by a huge educational platform, it should be okay, as they value their reputation too. However, you might not be the target audience if they’re teaching tram drivers to become programmers. Also, always read the refund policy.

For courses from individual creators or lesser-known companies, you need to see what they’ve achieved. There should be something that gives them some experience and reason to teach others:

Of course, they might deceive you, but distinguishing truth from deceit online is a separate topic. At least try to find and read some reviews on the different site.

Paid courses are mainly valuable for the feedback and because paying motivates you to learn. Otherwise, you can find similar materials cheaper in books or for free on YouTube.

Workshops and trainings are like courses but shorter, usually lasting a few hours. The same principles apply.

Community

I had never lived in a dormitory. So, in March 2022, four of my mates and I decided that we urgently needed to fix this gap and live together for a month or two. In our Yerevan trap house, everyone except me was looking for a new job. Our daily routine was as follows: wake up, work, someone goes for interviews — we discuss the questions, than grab some beers, solve LeetCode problems together, play cards, and then go to bed. During breaks, of course, we doomscrolled a lot as it was the at beginning of russian invasion to Ukraine. Every day was the same.

Although I wasn’t interviewing, I managed to improve my algorithm and data structures knowledges thanks to the situation and the environment. I share this story to show how your community can force your learning.

There are plenty of communities that facilitate learning. I interact with course graduates, colleagues, and we have chat groups for exchanging educational content and attending classes together. When I was leading media development, I intentionally got acquainted with the Meduza.io and Vc.ru CTOs to learn about their operations. My girlfriend and I periodically share what new things we’ve learned with each other. If you can share a meme with someone or in a group chat, you can also discuss learning topics in the same setting.

Media and blogs

This is what you can subscribe to and learn reactively when someone releases something. There are various mediums: websites, newsletters, social media, videos, podcasts — whatever suits you. These can be publications, aggregators, or personal blogs.

Here’s the list I’m subscribed myself:

Though I recommend everyone to build their own subscription pool, and it’s important to review it: either regularly or because someone posted some cringe, or because there’s nothing interesting to read, or vice versa, the feed is overwhelming.

How to choose? Reputation and track record matter, just like in courses. In media and aggregators, the community dictates the popularity, trends and ratings, so you can try to follow them.

When you’ve found something potentially interesting and useful, I suggest you to subscribe, read it for a month, and answer yourself:

If the answer to any of these is no, unsubscribe or archive it. If someone worries, “Oh, I’ll definitely read it later, and I’m afraid I’ll lose it, maybe it’ll be cool in some time” — create a separate document with links to such sources and don’t pollute your information space. That’s the thing that helps me not to worry.

The thing I miss here are some personal sites without RSS or any other subscription mechanism. Or blogs using platfroms like Twitter I try to avoid. I calm myself down with the thought that the same truely brilliant ideas can be found in many different sources.

Explaining to others

An obvious example: when I prepared the original presentation and then this article, I gained a better understanding of how my learning system works and what adjustments I want to make to it.

The explanation format doesn’t matter. You can even choose not to publish your explanations — just writing them down helps reinforce what you’ve learned or discover something new.

I actively use drafts in Notion to formulate thoughts and delve into topics. I try to gradually publish them here. I post shorter thoughts in my Telegram channel.

Of course, I actively explain things at work too: during calls, in messages, presentations, or documentation — but that’s the stuff I can’t freely share.

Internships

That’s a source I don’t use myself. But internships is a great option for a beginning, junior specialist. This is especially relevant for students and recent graduates. Internships are designed specifically to provide concentrated learning experiences for participants. I recommend looking for opportunities either in local tier-1 product companies or in international ones. Here’s the list of some well-known companies internship programs:

In either case, you’re likely to gain valuable experience. Smaller companies typically find internships costly. Consult with friends about their experiences and the conditions.

It’s better to start internships from your senior years, but it’s not mandatory. I have a friend who started interning in their second bachelor year, managed to intern at Google and Microsoft, and graduated from their master’s program with several years of experience.

However, I also know another friend who studied well, didn’t intern anywhere, and landed a middle-level salary immediately after graduating from their master’s program without any work experience.

Personally, I just started my career as a junior specialist at the first masters year, without any internships. With a slight delay regarding my fellows, I also reached a middle-level salary.

What’s missing

Other educational sources

Well, this list is huge:

Time to time I use some of them, but they are not the core part of my system. Take it a list of possibilities to try and add to your system depending on what do you like.

When to drop the education

That’s a tricky question for me as dropping something seems more natural than finishing with some effort. I rarely drop my education along the way, though. And if I do, it’s about the books mostly. I think than I quit learning, that’s because of the set of factors:

What’s next

I haven’t talked about how to learn more effectively, some other tricky details, but the bonus is that you can learn these things using your newly build system. If you’re interested in it, try Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers book or her Learning How to Learn course on Coursera.

Most of my examples were about professional education, that’s because the theme’s close to me. In general, you don’t owe anyone to be cool professionals. Try different things. Learn for hobbies, learn to help others, learn for your own pleasure whatever you want!

If you found this article helpful, please show your support by clapping, sharing it with your friends or colleagues, and subscribing to receive notifications for my new posts.

If you want to talk on managing engineering teams or departments, designing systems, or improving your technical product, email me at laidrivm@gmail.com or message me on https://t.me/laidrivm.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimir-lazarev/.

Peace!