Today at work, at our Monday general meeting, I gave a brief speech about my take on our value of Learning… so why not also share it with the world?
I believe that no other industry other than ours is so fast paced in terms of the technology needed to accomplish our jobs. Something which might be relevant one year, will be shunned and largely disused the next. Every week there is a new acronym for a new developer tool, every month there is an update to a framework we use. Development paradigms are always changing.
In short, if we are to excell above our competitors, we must truly embrace all facets of the learning process. We quite simply don’t have the right to call ourselves professionals without fully exhausting all the avenues we have at our disposal to learn new things.
These will come in the form of online seminars, meetup groups and conferences, discussing projects with colleages, work outside of work, always helping people – on stack overflow, forums and IRC, hours and hours of reading online documentation at midnight, and a good old fashioned book or two.
The media and news programs always report that our profession has benefits and culture which is the envy of every worker on the planet. I for one believe we should work hard to earn this place of ours in the world.