Breaking down the different stages of learning can be really helpful when we're trying to work out where we are and how far we can go. It can be quite scary to look at the big goal - perhaps professional web designer with a large portfolio of clients who rely on our expertise, when it's as much as we can do to remember the names of the software we'll be using to learn!
Let's look at four different levels of understanding. Whenever we take on anything new, we all experience these stages, and recognising them helps us to evaluate ourselves and our progress.
Career changers frequently begin at stage one - Unconscious Incompetent. We know we want to change at this stage, 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! It sounds pretty desperate, but knowing we want to change is the important thing - we can be taught everything else .
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.
Next comes stage two - Conscious Incompetent. We're now probably at the start of our training course. Having been explained the different options, we've decided on our career path. So we now know what we have to learn - in other words we're conscious of what we don't know yet, 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.
Unconsciously Competent - In IT, we'll probably be several years into our working experience before we reach stage four. We understand what we need to know, and no longer have to consciously think about why we do something. Although for the true professional school's never over, (and definitely in computer-related careers the joy is there's always more to learn) achieving these dizzy heights of understanding makes all the hard work worth it.
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