I have been a web developer for about two years. But when I look back there wasn't much progress for my skills. Why is that ? I discovered it because I was fooled by the "learn when you need it" principle. Yes, we do find some people become able to certain technologies when work forces them to use these technologies.
Syndrome junior developer (my term :D) is often inconsistent in learning, quickly influenced by other technologies. Today I'm learning framework X, tomorrow I'm learning framework Y. I used to be like that too. Once I found a programmer. I see he never learns but suddenly can with a certain framework. He said I wouldn't study technology until it actually made money (wouldn't learn technology that wasn't used in the office). I was consumed by that principle.
In fact, when we move into an office with new technology we should adapt faster, we must give the first impression, that we are qualified. But it's not easy if we never learn before. We will not grow if we do not learn outside of our work.
The second rebuttal, actually we have to create opportunities, don't wait for opportunities. This means that if the technology we learn is not used in the office, we can still use these skills as content. Even if we work fulltime content or course production we will run out of technology ideas to learn because we have made content.
Because of that, I finally realized that "productivity, lots of experience, lots of knowledge (even just on the surface) can all be sold" so it's not a loss to learn new technology.
So how I learn. I follow a pattern like this:
1. Choose free or premium resources/courses.
2. Practice and follow the resource/course, but change the case study with your own version, so that your case study is different from the case studies in the course. So that the pure end result is yours.
3. Like the second point, because of the different end results you can make your learning journey your content, for example on YouTube or blogs. So it doesn't matter if you make it open content.
4. When you follow the tutorial don't forget to refactor your code from various sources so that the quality of your code gets better.
So with the pattern above, you gain knowledge as well as produce content.
LEARN FROM THE COURSE => FOLLOW THE TUTORIAL BUT WITH A DIFFERENT CASE STUDY => DOCUMENT AS CONTENT => REFACTOR CODE => MAKE IT MONEY
Therefore, keep learning, see you in the next article :D