Build A Better Career

Dividing the different stages of learning into sections can be really helpful when we’re trying to work out where we are and how far we can go. Looking at the big goal can be quite scary – (let’s say professional web designer with a big portfolio of customers who are dependent on our expertise), when it’s as much as we can do to recall the names of the software we’ll be learning from!

We’re going to look at four levels of understanding. Whenever we take on something new, we all go through these stages, and recognising them helps us to measure ourselves and our progress.

1. Unconscious Incompetent, 2. Conscious Incompetent, 3. Conscious Competent, 4. Unconscious Competent

Career changers often start at stage one – Unconscious Incompetent. This is when we know we want to change, but we don’t yet know what we don’t know, what we need to know, how to learn it or where it might lead us! Sounds pretty desperate, but the important thing is knowing we want to change – everything else can be taught.

Getting advice is the essential thing for the stage one person. By talking things through with an experienced advisor, they can find out what’s involved in the process; discover where they want to go and what they need to learn.

This moves us swiftly on to stage two – Conscious Incompetent. Now we’re probably at the start of your training course. Having been taught the different options, we’ve decided on our career path, and we know what we have to learn – in other words we’re conscious of what we don’t yet know, or what we’re currently incompetent at.

Understanding this is important, to have the wisdom of knowing where we are. Grasping conscious incompetence means that we don’t get quite so frustrated in the early stages of our learning – it’s possible we’re not very good at it (especially if it’s been a while since we were at school…) but we know we’ll get better. Modern interactive learning accelerates this process, so we won’t be at this stage for long.

Conscious Competent takes us to stage three. We’re in the flow of the learning environment, and can pick things up much more quickly. We still have to consciously think about what we’re doing on a continuous basis, but we’re able to learn competently. We’ll most likely complete our studies and successfully pass our exams during this learning stage, which will probably also extend into our working life too.

Think about when we learned to drive a car. We’d reached conscious competency at the time of our exam – still very conscious of every manoeuvre, but good enough to pass the test. We could only move into stage four when we gained more experience along with the knowledge.

In the computer world, before we become Unconsciously Competent we’ll most likely be several years into our working experience. At that stage, we know what we need to know, and no longer have to consciously think about why we do something. Although school’s never out for the pro, (and the joy in IT is there’s always more to learn) getting to this lofty height of understanding makes all the hard work worth it.

(C) 2009. Browse LearningLolly.com for the best ideas on Windows Home Server and Windows Home Server Training.