How to Learn Technical Skills Faster
July 25, 2017
The following is an excerpt from the best-selling The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide by John Sonmez.
From the chapter: How to Learn Technical Skills Faster
Now that I’ve given you a nice long list of technical skills to develop, you might be wondering how you are going to develop all of those skills and how long it is going to take you.
Well, as for the length of time—don’t worry—you’ll be developing your technical skills as long as you are a software developer. Think of it as a journey, not a destination.
You will always be able to get better—if you choose to.
I’ve spent plenty of time developing my technical skills the wrong way.
However, in my three years of creating over 50 highly-technical developer training courses on Pluralsight, I’ve also learned how to develop technical skills at a lightning fast speed while teaching others at the same time.
I used to think the best way to learn a technical skill was to take a big reference book and read it cover-to-cover.
Back then, I read too many 800+ page books to count and didn’t benefit much from the exercise; although my arms might have grown from carrying around books of that size.
I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did, and if you already have, I want to show you a better way.
Learning How to Learn Quickly
Before we get into the specifics about learning technical skills, I think it’s worth taking a second to talk about learning anything quickly and teaching yourself in general.
We’ll go much more in-depth about the topic of teaching yourself in an upcoming chapter in this section, but I want to go over the basics here and talk about a methodology I use to learn anything quickly.
As I mentioned, I spent a large amount of time both learning and teaching various technologies.
I learned whole programming languages in a matter of weeks and then turned around and taught courses on them.
During that process, I developed a reliable system for learning just about anything I needed to learn.
This wasn’t so much a conscious effort as it was a necessity. I was trying to learn at such a rapid rate that I had to come up with efficient ways of doing things, and naturally, patterns of learning developed which helped me to become faster and faster.
I’m just going to cover the basics here, since you can find a whole course I put together on the subject at 10 Steps to Learn or in a few chapters in my Soft Skills book.
About the Author
