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Miss conferences? Continue personal development with these online resources.

Updated: Jan 3, 2022


There are a number of conferences I normally look forward to... Adobe Summit, Knime Summit, SiriusDecisions Summit, Dreamforce, Sirius Decision TechX, and Adobe Max to name a few. Can’t attend all of them every year but I try to cherry-pick the most compelling.

I’ve found them to be insightful and invigorating... New ideas start to flow like water. If it were just the content, that can easily be replicated digitally. Another part of the benefit is the Audience interaction and direct access to trainers in workshops as dialogue clarifies ideas or generates new ones. But one of the most important pieces for me is the change of location which allows for sustained focus (away from the daily barrage of issues in your profession and personal life) which opens up your mind to accept important but hard ideas/changes. It’s the same reason why management off-sites work better than a series of meetings.

I really really really miss in-person conferences but the pandemic that has gripped the world makes these events impossible.

The silver lining is many organizations (in response to the pandemic) have made materials available online and often at no cost. Creating content, organizing it, and publishing it isn’t free, so I applaud all the organizations that didn’t try to replicate the pay barrier of in-person events and decide to take the altruistic approach and shared their content freely to continue helping the community upskill while we are all stuck at home.


To avoid learning and not taking action, try to do one or a combination of these:

  • Take some personal development time. Set the expectation with your manager and your team you are in training and unavailable for 3–5 day and so you can extract yourself from the day to day busy work and problem solving delegating work and response ownership. This should be sufficient time for a course or 2. Ideally, you can schedule one of these a quarter.

  • If your organization offer this take a sabbatical. These are great because they typically last 4–8 weeks coworkers will know not to cc you on emails and you won’t come back to a mountain of email. This is sufficient time to take a series of courses in one or a broad set of topics.

  • A career break take the most commitment as this is the option where you are not paid and you have no guarantees your role is waiting for you but you have control over the length of time

I believe in being a life long learner… I have borrowed the motto get “Smarter Every Day” (from Destin on the Youtube channel SmarterEveryDay). Strive to learn something new every day adding new tools to your toolbox. It can be for your professional life or can be for your hobbies for your personal life. You may be surprised how many concepts from unrelated areas are transferable to another industry. It boils down to breaking down what you have learned into a process and abstract the hard skills… then you might see it can be used somewhere else. Whether it’s taking a series of week-long breaks through the year or a month-long sabbatical or a career break… find ways to get “Smarter Every Day”… I hope you will find it as full filling as I did.


 

Here are some useful learning sources (some are free).

Data Science

Over the years, I have had random ventures into learning Data Science (articles, youtube videos, workshops). For me, this was not nearly as effective as the Learning Paths from Alteryx. I first encountered Alteryx at a Marketing Conference and have become a big fan. Their Designer product makes Data Engineering and Science approachable… I find the interface initiative and easy to use. The community is active and helpful and I love the weekly challenges posted to keep your skills sharp. Also there is a nano-degree Alteryx worked on with Tableau and Udacity (see below).


Udacity has nano-degrees in Data Science and other technical areas. These are collections of courses that give you broad exposure to topics in that area of study. I really enjoyed the Data Science: Predictive Analytics for Business degree program. These typically take a few months to complete and take quite a bit of time commitment. What I loved was the project-oriented approach to evaluation and progression to the next course. Each course has a number of smaller hands-on projects that let you practice the concept being taught and usually ends with a graded hands-on practical project that leverages all the concepts taught in that course. The projects in this degree program revolved around business problems (similar to ones I’ve seen in my work life). Summiting the project in for review isn’t the end of the process. There is a real person that reviews your work and provides notes on areas that need improvement… if you don’t get it perfect, it is sent back to you so you can see where you were deficient and you keep working on it until it’s perfect. I love this being an iterative refinement process where you learn to get smarter (every day) 🙂 If at any point you get stuck, you can ask a mentor or the Udacity community for help. It’s not as instant as an in-person course but I consistently got responses within a couple of hours. The nano-degree was capped off with a large capstone project that combined concepts across all the courses.


Udacity also has stand-alone courses if you can’t commit to the time needed for a nano-degree. There are lots of topics available and some are free, like this Tableau Data Visualization course.

I’ve taken some in-person courses over the years. There is also online material organized in a couple pathways and covers much of the same material as the in-person courses and more. And best of all the platform and self-paced learning is free.

Harvard has some courses available on edX. Note the free path doesn’t include a certificate or graded assessments and you have a limited time (i.e. 1 month) to complete the course. You can always upgrade to the Verified Path for unlimited access etc.

For those wanting a deeper dive into programming and the math of data science, Machine Learning Mastery is a great free resource. Sign up for the emails and each week you will be sent something to learn.

B2B Marketing

I have a soft spot for Adobe Summit partially because I have great memories of being a speaker at a couple of sessions. But mostly because it really does try to cover all things marketing at multiple levels through different tracks (from decision-makers to practitioner). Topics span from advertising, email marketing, web marketing, analytics, orchestration, and more. Because of the pandemic, this paid in-person event has become a free online event.

Sirius Decision used to have some of the most relevant blogs for B2B marketing and I’ve taken many of their online courses. Unfortunately, after they were acquired by Forrester free access to their materials has been greatly reduced. There are lots of topic/tool specific sites… Has anyone come across anything similar to the old SiriusDecisions Blogs?

Creative

Max is another great Adobe event that has gone digital and free this year. It inspires with all the cool new tools and sessions to show you how to use them. Topics range from image editing, video editing, 3D models, rapid prototyping, and more. These are well put together and scripted so they are succinct.

Mainly focused on Creative topics as the name suggests. I have watched a couple CreativeLive webnairs but found the quality of the content was inconsistent but that might be because they were the free webinars.

Programming

Jetbrains not only produces an excellent Integration Development Environment but is has an Academy to help you get started in one of the programming languages they support. All available for free.


Various

Pluralsight has a lot of courses for technical topics and has branched out to soft skills. I took a couple of courses recently. Introduction to SQL, Core Python: Getting Started, Getting started with Programming in Java, Getting Started with Linux… etc. I enjoyed the depth to time commitment balance these had. There are many courses covering the same topic and expertise level so it’s a good idea to watch part of a lesson to see if you like how the instructor explains things. There is a 7 day free trial for new users.

Lynda.com is now LinkedIn Learning… this is one of the first Digital Learning sites I used. It started with more creative skills and has branched into more technical courses. I’ve taken a number of photography courses here. There are many courses covering the same topic and level so it’s a good idea to watch part of a lesson to see if you like how the instructor explains things as you will be spending a lot of time together. There is a 30 day free trial for new users.


Have fun getting smarter (every day). And check out the SmarterEveryDay Youtube Channel it has lots of cool engineering topics.





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