So Much to Learn

One of my favorite comic strips was (sadly) The Far Side. One of my favorite Far Side strips showed a caveman looking at his son’s report card which included an “F” in history. The caption read “Great, you flunk something not happen yet.” I liked the cartoon because history was never my strong suit, and I’m often reminded of that when I talk to my brother, who teaches history. Once, while watching a favorite TV show, As Schools Match Wits, I started thinking: “I’m doing pretty well with the history questions” – then I realized history in this setting was the current events I lived through as a child. Still, I am grateful that there is time to learn more about history.

This week; however, I was constantly reminded of how many topics I need to know more about. I work in technology, and this year, we are rolling out Windows 7, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 and we are ramping up our ECM effort. Of course, that’s the stuff I expect I have to learn; that’s my job. I also found that I have to learn a little more about basketball. One of my alma maters, West Virginia University, has entered the Final Four. Now that was completely unexpected as it hasn’t happened in 51 years! So, in between reading white papers from Microsoft and AIIM, I’m on the phone with a friend listening as he explains nuances of college basketball strategy and I’m paying more attention to the ESPN App on my iPhone.

With all the changes we are making at work, I started looking at the training plan and I realized that I have to get more people involved in training if I’m going to pull this off. Ironically, our previous guest blogger Guila Muir just published a very nice white paper titled Building an In-House Training Team. We have had a successful in-house training program in place for over five years, but it’s currently a one man show. Guila offers some very good points on how I might expand that to include a few others.

Another thing that reminded me of how much there is to learn, was the Table Topics session at our Toastmasters Club on Tuesday. The Topic Master had an handful of envelopes representing various years between 2010 and 2018. In each envelope was a series of snippets of the Health Care Reform bill. Suffice it to say, there were a few things in those envelopes I found surprising. For the bill, against the bill or indifferent toward the bill, I would guess we all could stand to learn more about the bill.

I think what most impressed me this week was, in addition to how much I need to learn, the variety of people, places and resources for learning that are available to me. I can search the web to learn more about the impact of some historical figure or events (I can also send my brother an email). I can watch a basketball game with commentary from a friend, follow sports blogs or WVU’s web site. I can open my inbox or my Favorites or TweetDeck and find links to experts like Guila, the folks at Centroid, @EUSP and a host of other experts across an amazing array of subjects. My membership in Toastmasters frequently puts me in the audience of a subject matter expert and my membership in AIIM gives me access to a wealth of information about Enterprise Content Management (ECM) - speaking of AIIM, check out the sidebar link for AIIM Expo. All I have to do is allocate time to learning and I can learn what I need to know.

One last note: Go WVU!