October 29th, 2009The 4 Learning Stages – And How They Affect YOU…
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.
1. Unconscious Incompetent, 2. Conscious Incompetent, 3. Conscious Competent, 4. Unconscious Competent
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 .
The essential thing is to get advice. By talking things through with an experienced advisor, the stage one person can discover what’s involved in the process; find out where they want to go and what they need to learn.
This moves us swiftly on to stage two – Conscious Incompetent. Now we’re probably at the start of your training course. Having been taught the different options, we’ve decided on our career path, and we know what we have to learn – in other words we’re conscious of what we don’t yet know, or what we’re currently incompetent at.
It’s important to understand this, to have the wisdom of knowing where we are. Understanding conscious incompetence means that we don’t get so frustrated in our early stages of learning – we might not be very good at it (especially if it’s been a while since school…) but we know we’ll get better. Modern interactive learning accelerates this process, so we don’t have to stay 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.
Remember when we learned to drive a car? We’d got to conscious competency by test time – good enough to pass the exam but still consciously aware of every manoeuvre. It wasn’t until we gained more experience to consolidate the knowledge that we moved into stage four.
In the computer world, before we become Unconsciously Competent we’ll most likely be several years into our working experience. At that stage, we know what we need to know, and no longer have to consciously think about why we do something. Although school’s never out for the pro, (and the joy in IT is there’s always more to learn) getting to this lofty height of understanding makes all the hard work worth it.
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