Learning Plateaus

One thing that shocks new developers (and the people around them) is just how much time is required for learning, relearning, building new skills, and internalizing new concepts when building software. It’s nearly impossible to stay caught up on technology as a developer using only your work hours, and even people that spend a lot of time learning new things outside of work often find themselves struggling to keep up. In short, when you signed up to be a software developer, you signed up to be a lifelong learner. Your ability to continually refine the way that you learn new material will either help you achieve your career goals or it will deny them to you entirely. Worse still, the way that most of us were taught in school is NOTHING like the way that we have to learn on the fly in the real world. When you were in school, you had someone around who could help get you unstuck from a learning plateau when you encountered one. In post-school life, these types of people are much more rare, their time is more expensive, and the knowledge they teach is more specific, possibly even too specific to be helpful. Software developers are often expected to pick up new technology in a relatively short period of time. Making it worse, there are often several things you need to be learning quickly at the same time, meaning that if you spend an excessive amount of time learning one thing, it can often mean lost opportunities with the other stuff you are supposed to be learning. It’s also monstrously frustrating, because you probably are around people who learn some things more quickly than you do – if they learn more slowly, they are probably trying to hide that fact. When you reach a point where you are putting in more effort, but achieving less growth, you need some effective strategies to help you start improving again. The better your strategy is, the better your career will be over the long term. So, what is a “learning plateau” and why does it happen? A “learning plateau” is a term used in educational psychology. It denotes a time during the course of learning, where the learner, despite putting in the work, seems to make no significant progress. There are a variety of causes of learning plateaus, from changes in motivation, to a lack of time and money, to simply hitting a psychological limit. And if you are regularly in the habit of learning new things, learning plateaus are an almost-certain occurrence, even if you really enjoy what you are learning. While addressing the causes of a learning plateau is useful, it’s also important to note that they are simply a natural feature of the learning process. If you hit a plateau, it’s because you climbed up to it. Developers are subject to drinking from a firehose when it comes to learning. It’s just the way things are now. Learning plateaus are inevitable in the best of environments and it’s arguable that the learning environment for software developers is far from the best. As a result, you are going to regularly run into plateaus in your efforts to learn new technology. Therefore your career growth is directly related to how quickly you can overcome plateaus. If you can do it quickly, then you can learn more useful technology more quickly, which will help keep your skills sharp. Being able to quickly overcome plateaus will also make the acquisition of skills more pleasant, simply because it will make it less of a slog. It doesn’t just help your work life though – it can also free up lots of time for having a life outside of work. Episode Breakdown Find your weak spots and address those. Growth in any skill is typically uneven. Not only do you learn some things faster, but some things are also far less enjoyable, more difficult to practice, more complex, or easy to forget. It’s also very common training the areas in which you are weak...