What's your biggest learning blocker?

🗄️ Archive
1

We’re always trying to figure out how to help folks. Best way is to ask you - what are your biggest blockers? I spotted some themes, I’d love to know what your particular blockers are too.

Here are some answers so far:

From LinkedIn

“It was my confidence now it’s channeling my learning in the direction that I want to go” Lisa Overall

“Everyday is a school day, ask questions. The only blocker is not asking the right questions.” - Alex Luke

“Conflicting right testing with false thinking by organization management” - Jerry Durant

“Getting deviated.” Verun N.

“Depends on what I want to learn … new technology - patience. new method - time and money, new way of thinking or changing perspective - out-of-box thinking. The key ist to recognize what is blocking me and how to eliminate it, so all your answers fit for me somehow.” Kai Bronner

“Funding and Time will always be the top of the list. Thankfully it helps to have forward looking and supportive management who can see the value in upskilling staff not just to boost the individuals productivity, but to also nurture them and make them feel valued in the organisation.” Andy Scarr

“Too much information. It’s hard to know what to focus on.” Christine Lynch

“There’s lots of noise from so called experts, gone are the days when you had to be a subject expert to publish ones opinion. The quality of resource has deteriorated as the quantity increased.” Oleg Pantsjoha

“Time, or rather lack thereof.” Jeanette Fincher

" Too much information, lack of time and (sometimes) out-of-box thinking" Milan Půlpán

“Wanting to learn everything!” Kevin Tuck

“Mindset and lack of interest in particular subject other than these two nothing else blocking” Priyanka Halder

“Lack of time” Prajakta Vartak

“I am not sure what that means ! I don’t think I can learn anything a 100% it’s a constant evolution. If I think I know something a 100% I am definitely not asking the right questions or asking the right people.” Aprajita Mathur

“Time” Mikhail Laptev

“Quest for infinite knowledge” Sutapa Sarkar

“Insufficient sleep” Johnathan B.

“Money” Houssem Mhamdi

4 Likes
2

I will definitely say time and complexity combined.

An example:
Setting up an automation browser test grid takes an understanding of a range of things such as Jenkins (or similar CI servers), nodes, hubs, browser versions and compatibility, OS variants and much, much more.

Unfortunately, I found most guides are too general (expected knowledge I did not have) or the guides ran off on technical tangents and you end up down a rabbit whole reading about information you do not need to get a basic set up.

My idea of a good guide would be A-Z steps to get a basic grid setup in under a hour (really only took about 30 minutes). This guide would then have a ‘here is how you do even more’ sections such as adding extra browsers, configuring VMs, etc.

We all have hectic lifestyles and squeezing a hour or two once a week will eventually get you there yet you lose so much time by picking it up again, becoming familiar with what you learned two weeks or two months ago.

I feel it would be nice to just have it done this week not this year and if we had a solid week to just learn it there would be no issues.

PS - We did finally get that grid running :wink:

2 Likes
3

Time and burnout after 8h workday.

In order to learn something complex and meaningful, you often need to invest a few hours, and it’s hard to do that after working for 8h. When I come home from work I usually feel burnout and lack of motivation, so forcing myself to learn in such state is simply not effective since I can’t keep my focus on subject.

2 Likes
4

Are you not able to be given time during your workday to learn?

As you learning and improving is in your employer’s interests. Plus, it helps break the day up and can be a morale boost to!

5

Totally agree. One of the things I love about where I work, one of the things that prospective candidates mention, and one of the things that I use to ‘sell’ the company is the emphasis placed on learning and helping people to grow. We have a library, and dedicated learning time, and there is an almost academic air around the company. The person who recruited me said it was almost like being back at university.

6

I can use my slack time to learn, but it’s an big open office so it’s easy to get distracted. And my slack time is scarce lately since we have many ongoing projects.

1 Like
7

For me, it’s finding the activation energy to begin learning something new (at least for things that I know are going to take me a while, like learning a new language).

That initial frustration period, where I can’t get anything done, knowing that I could have finished hours ago if I had just done it the way I knew how, etc is always hard to mentally prep myself for, much less committing to paying off that initial cost.

I know I really like the phase after I get over that initial hump, and then it’s downhill from there, especially when you get to the point where it starts clicking together and you’re able to actually connect what appears to be disparate bits and bobbles to create something that’s greater than the sum of it’s parts, but finding the motivation to overcome that initial part is hard.

8

  • Lack of plenty of exercises and solutions to them.

  • Lack of non-trivial exercises or projects.

  • Too many learning resources for one topic and too many curators (affiliates) who are just trying to sell you stuff often without even using the product which they curate.

I need an authoritative analysis of a learning resource. One of my teachers had analysed several books for a course before recommending one to us and he gave a solid justification for his choice. It was by far the best choice in most student’s opinion.

Some of these curators/content creators are proven to be charlatans & have even apologized publicly. Some claim to have gone from being low wage worker to programmer with 6 figure salary (and Tesla). There is no way to know if they just got lucky or if they are even employed. Some of these people make books & courses of questionable quality. It seems that some of them just want to take undue advantage of the gold rush due to a shortage of skilled IT workers. Too much noise to figure out what is real and worth pursuing.