Using MOOC's for Your Personal Development

We have more resources than ever available for personal development today, and one of the resources that people often overlook are MOOCs.  MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course.  They are courses that are offered by universities through a provider like Coursera or Edx that anyone can sign up for and take over the internet.  When I say anyone, I mean anyone.  Classes often start out with tens of thousands of students from all over the world.

Generally, you will watch 1-2 hours of videos each week, and often within the video there will be some practice quizzes.  Videos can be watched at any time, so this is helpful for busy professionals who don't have time to take out of their day to go to a class at a specific time.  You also typically have an assignment to complete each week.  In many cases, these are peer graded, meaning other students will grade your work and provide feedback, while you do the same for their work.  This actually turns out to be pretty effective and you get multiple perspectives on how you are learning.

Usually just taking a class is free or you can pay a small fee ($50 - $100) to earn a verified certificate.   At this time, these classes still don't carry the same weight as a standard university program, but attitudes on this may be starting to change.  I also would say that the primary reason you should be doing this is for personal enrichment.  The fact that you are learning is the most important thing, and in the end, if you are learning and improving yourself, that always shines through regardless of whether or not you earned a certificate.

What Types of Courses Are Available

Just about everything.  This includes computer science courses, math courses, engineering courses and business courses.

What many of these courses do is provide you a good introduction to the subject.  Think of it like attending a 3 day seminar in the topic.  That isn't going to be a full semester's worth of depth, but it will get you familiar with the fundamentals of the topic.  Often times, I have seen similar such seminars advertised and these cost $1500-$2000.  So it is really a good deal to be able to take courses like this for low or no cost.  Once you take a course and know you are interested in the topic, you can always pursue additional studies as well.

That doesn't mean that there aren't courses that get to depth.  A friend of mine took the Algorithms course taught by Princeton on Coursera.  He showed me the homework and I can say it was a very in-depth, difficult course.  There are also Calculus courses that look like the equivalent to taking the same course on campus.  So these are great if for some reason you need to go back to school and brush up on some of these topics.

Some Specific Recommendations

I want to recommend two courses that I have taken that I found to be very good.  Both of these courses are in the business/management area, and I found them useful from a sense that they have helped me on gaining new perspectives about how decisions are made from a business perspective.


Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies

https://www.coursera.org/course/innovativeideas

This course is aimed at people who are interested in starting their own business.  By this I mean starting any business, not just a technology business.  It is an introductory level course, but it does give you some exposure to some things you need to consider when thinking about starting a new business and putting together a business plan.

I think what I found most useful was that this course introduced me to something called the Business Model Canvas.  The business model canvas is a visual way to answer nine key questions about a new business you intend to start.  These include areas like what is your value proposition, who are your customers, who are your partners and what is your cost structure.  These are all factors that would go into a business plan, but by organizing this information visually, you can get a better idea of how it fits together and what areas really might need more thought.

One thing to understand though is that a tool like the business model canvas is not just for someone who is starting a business.  These are really questions that any business or non-profit should be able to answer at any time and clearly communicate to everyone involved.  So using this tool, you can better understand how your company or your department fits into the larger business ecosystem and what are the real drivers behind the decisions that are made.  To be honest, I wish every company would fill out and regularly update a business model canvas of their own, and then hang an extra large version up on a wall somewhere where everyone could see it and contribute to it.  I think this would really help to bring a lot of clarity to what the mission was and how everything fits together.

Foundations of Business Strategy

https://www.coursera.org/learn/business-strategy

My degree is in engineering, so I took relatively few business courses while in college.  As we progress as professionals, we understand that technology is rarely the sole driver of any decision.  There are marketplace dynamics and an overall strategy of our organization to be considers.  This course provides an introduction to different strategies that a firm can choose and why a firm might choose to adopt them.

One of my takeaways from the course was that even though two firms are in the same market, they may not be competitors because they are targeting different segments of that market.  What this course does is give you some of the tools to answer those questions about competitive dynamics and how markets are structured.  What is useful here is to understand what segment of the market your firm competes in and the competitive forces that surround that segment, and this course gives you the tools to answer those questions.

Summary

Don't overlook these online courses for your personal learning.  These courses are especially useful for helping you to learn about a topic that you have minimal familiarity with, and you can do so on your own time at very low cost.

If you have a particular course that you have taken and found useful, feel free to leave a comment.  I'd be interested to hear what other's experiences has been with an MOOCs they have taken.

Some Books to Help Develop You Professional Skills

We often here the term "soft skills" when talking about personal development, but I prefer to call these professional skills, because I think that better describes the skills we are trying to develop.  When we talk about skills like time management, communication, the ability to work in a team or work independently, the ability to make good decisions, I think what we are really talking about is someone's ability to work in a professional environment and carry themselves as a professional.

So we will often hear someone say "This person needs to work on their soft skills".  We might even hear someone mention a specific soft skill, like a person needs to work on their communication skills.  But what is often missing from the discussion are the specifics of how to work on these skills.  Without the how, these phrases are just empty advice.

I read not only technical material, but also quite a bit of material on what I would consider professional skills.  As you would expect, some is good, some is OK and some didn't meet my expectations.  What I have done below is summarize the best of the material I have read and spelled out why I think each particular resource is worth the investment of your time.

As a technical professional, we have to devote a lot of our learning time to technical skills, whether that be development languages and techniques, IT Pro skills or different techniques around analysis and project management.  But everyone still needs to set aside some time to work on these professional skills.  So with that in mind, lets take a look at the list:

Personal Kanban

We've all heard "You need to work smarter, not harder".  Ever notice that no one ever tells you how to do that?

Kanban has its roots in the Toyota Production System and has two essential rules.  Limit your work in progress and visualize your workflow.  By limiting your work in progress, you actually get things done faster because you are focused and not constantly expending cycles to switch tasks.  By visualizing your workflow, you you can better understand the work you have in front of you an prioritize the right things to be worked on first.  Personal Kanban shows you in detail to apply these principles you your personal workflow  The result is that you feel more in control of what you are working on and can make the right choices about what needs to get done when.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

This is a book that every professional in every field should read, and then probably re-read every few years.  The seven habits laid out by Dr. Covey (Be Proactive, Begin with the end in mind, Put first things first, Think win/win, Seek first to understand, then to be understood, Synergize and Sharpen the saw) are habits that none of us will ever truly master, but we must always be improving in order to improve our personal effectiveness.  Dr. Covey also describes how the goal is to have a team of interdependent people working together, who combine their skills to be more than the sum of their individual talents.  But to do so, everyone must first grow from a stage of dependence to interdependence, and then achieve a level of trust with others that make us interdependent.

This is not a book filled with cliche's and pie in the sky pictures.  There is real advice in this book about how to improve yourself in these areas and as a result improve your professional life.  The seven habits are timeless and serve as the underpinning of all of our achievements, which is why it is so important that we are aware of these habits and constantly striving to improve in these areas.

Decisive

We make decisions all of the time.  However, most of us don't have a good process for making decisions.  As the first chapter of this book discusses, neither do most companies.  As a result, the success rate of the decisions we make is much lower than it should be.

Decisive is all about how to refine your decision making process so that you can make more informed and ultimately better decisions.  The author's first explore the reasons why we tend to make bad decisions, like limiting our options or favoring information that supports a position we are pre-disposed to.  Then, they discuss techniques that help you overcome these shortcomings in our decision making process.

After reading Decisive, you will have the tools to be a much more analytical decision maker, who considers a wider variety or options and knows how to really test if your assumptions are valid or not.  And you will learn how to set tripwires after you have made a decision to make sure that you have indeed made the right choice or you need to reconsider.

Delivering Happiness

As I continue in my career, I have realized how important customer focus is.  Everyone has a customer, and if that customer isn't happy, they will find someone else that can better meet their needs.  This is even true for internal customers.

Today though, customer satisfaction is about much more than just "checking all the boxes" or "we delivered what the customer asked for".  Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) introduces us to the concept that we have to delight our customers.  And this is so true.  When we delight our customers, they become our biggest supporters.

There is much more to this book, and a lot of it is about new thinking in terms of leadership.  Zappos doesn't track the time its customer service associates spends on any one call because it trusts them to do the right thing.  And for associates who join and decide Zappos isn't the place for them, they will actually give them a lump sum to walk away, no hard feelings.  These are refreshing new ideas about how to lead a company, and will challenge you to think about leadership differently.

Drive

I strongly recommend that anyone in a leadership position, whether formal or informal read Drive.

Mr. Pink describes how we have managed people for the last hundred years or so in a top down, hierarchical fashion and why this mode of management is outdated today, especially for knowledge workers.  He describes the differences between extrinsic motivation (e.g. financial incentives, carrot and stick approaches) and intrinsic motivation (people who are self motivated to do a good job based on the purpose), and he explains why intrinsic motivation is always superior to extrinsic motivation.

Pink describes three factors that lead to true motivation: autonomy, purpose and mastery.  It is these three factors you need to make sure everyone has in order to insure they are truly motivated to do their best work.  Making sure these three factors are present is the key to making sure that people are intrinsically motivated, and ultimately to performing their best.  This isn't about motivating people, but about creating the right environment where people are intrinsically motivated to do their best work.

Turn the Ship Around

There are a lot of books that have been written about leadership and many of them are filled with empty cliches and advice.  This book is the real deal though.

Written by a former US Navy submarine Captain David Marquet, this book talks about creating leadership at all levels and about how you can effectively move away from the command and control structures common in most organizations.  In the beginning of the book, he talks about so often someone starts a new job with excitement and the feeling that they can make a difference, only to be completely burned out and disillusioned 6 months later when it is clear that they have no power and decisions flow from the top.

This book describes the practices and challenges envountered by Captain Marquet as he took the USS Sante Fe from the worst performing ship in the fleet to the best.  What I liked most about the book is that Captain Marquet doesn't just tell us his success stories, he also tells us about the failures along the way, how he was tempted to go back to the old command model and how he ultimately overcame them.

Whether you are in a formal or informal leadership position, this book is well worth your time.  We so much need everyone to feel as though they can take the initiative, to contribute their ideas and that their voice matters, and this book shows you how giving away control to those around you can result in a better organization that truly does value everyone's contributions.

The Essential Drucker

Peter Drucker is known as the father of modern management, and his advice today is as relevant as it was 50 years ago.  You might think that because much of these writings come from decades ago, they would be out of date in today's world.  Not so.  Mr. Drucker was a man who was truly ahead of his time.

This work covers every aspect of leadership in an organization, fro having a clear objective to strategy to hiring to problem solving.  There are not many areas it does not touch on.

This was one of the first business books that I read and I still consider it one of the best.  Probably what I like most is how plain spoken the advice is.  Again, as with all of these books, there aren't any unicorns.  There is simply real hands on advice to real, every day problems that are encountered by people at every level of the organization.





As time goes on, I'll add more books to this list, so you may want to check back occasionally.  Most of these books you can get an eBook copy from Amazon for around $10-$15.  I would recommend this approach because many of these books you may want to refer back to or re-read at different times to refresh yourself on the principles they share.  If cost is an issue though, don't hesitate to check your local public library for a copy.

I hope you enjoy the list, and if you have any reading recommendations for me, put them in comments below and I'll try to get to them.