You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Professional Development?

In today's episode, Monina asks, What do you currently do for professional development? What do you look for? So that's a really interesting question because in a lot of ways, I think the type of professional development I do is mostly tailored to how I learn, and that's one of the things that's really important for any organization uh to do and and for any individual practitioner to know is how do you learn best. Uh there are all these different methods and techniques for learning, uh whether it is just passive content consumption, courses, training, conferences, uh you name it, there's uh a million and a half different ways to learn uh some a topic. The question is, how do you learn best?

And if you're managing people, how do they learn best? Because there's a lot of cases where uh well a technique that works for one person will not work for another person. My personal uh methodology is uh in academia, it's called inquiry-based learning or problem-based learning. This is essentially uh when you start with a problem that you're trying to solve and then you explore all the ways to solve that problem. Um this methodology comes from really the 1960s.

Uh at least the discipline as it's known today, it's it it's much older than that. Uh you could argue that uh Socrates and and such back in antiquity were doing this sort of thing because it's f it's functional learning. Uh uh the the specific discipline is comes from McMaster University in the 1960s in medical school, where students uh in response to their complaints that you know at the time medical school was just vast amounts of memorization without any practice, they said this doesn't help us solve problems that we're likely to face in in the medical world inquiry based learning brings together uh many many different skills so if you're given a problem how do you solve that problem what are the ways you can solve that now it requires a few things to be effective number one uh it requires a lot of time because you have to have the time to explore all the solutions it requires access to the information in some fashion format whether that's through a mentor or through a search engine or whatever um and it requires a base level of skills so if you don't have any skills whatsoever for example in data science uh it would be a very difficult way to start learning data science you know open up the R Studio IDE and uh is then you've got that blank cursor and uh and an empty file and you're like great what do I do now um so you probably want some other methods to supplement it like a basic class or a course uh I usually get my base skills from online courses or uh reading tons and tons of specialist material looking at the ways people have already tried to solve the problem and picking up techniques that they use and adding them to my repertoire in um on Saturday nights I do this thing. Sometimes I post about it on Facebook on my personal profile and on LinkedIn, but uh sometimes I don't. I call it Saturday night Data Party, where I take a problem that uh I want to explore or a data set that I want to explore, um, and I dig into it, and it's sometimes it's work related, sometimes it's not.

Sometimes a piece of data crosses my desk is like, wow, that's really interesting. What can we do with that? Uh how could we use that? Um, or a problem like, you know, how do I make helper reporter more actionable? It's 150 queries in this thing.

How do I turn that into to something that I can take action on faster? And then I try and solve that problem. Now there's some downsides to this approach. Like I said, one, it does require a lot of time, it requires some base skills, and it can be inefficient. Um you may learn how to solve a problem, and you may come up with a solution, but it may not be the best solution.

Uh you you may not discover uh best practices this way uh unless you are uh actively looking for them. And uh you may reinvent the wheel a lot, and that's okay in training and development. Uh reinventing the wheel sometimes is the only way to learn how a wheel works. If you're on a time crunch, it's probably not the fastest way to learn. But it is a way to learn thoroughly so that you can uh be a practitioner and be able to stand behind your work.

You know how a piece of code works or a tool works because you've used it to solve that problem. Where inquiry based learning really shines, I think, is in agency life, in client work, um, in places where you need to be able to show practical experience uh cases that um when a client says, Oh, you know, what what kind of experience do you have in this in this field or in this industry, you can show very clear specific examples of how you solved in that industry. And if you haven't, if you can get a hold of a data set from the industry, you can show how you solved for it, even if you've never done paying client work in that industry, which is super super important. If you were trying to start your own business, um, if you're trying to start a new team or a new line of business inside of a company, uh having that portfolio of casework that you've done really helps illustrate uh your skills and instill confidence in somebody that you've done this before, you know what you're doing. So inquiry-based learning is really great for agency life.

Um the catch is you have to have time to do it. So one of the most important things in general in professional development is making time for it, but doubly so if you are an inquiry-based learner, you must block off time in your schedule uh every week, ideally every day, so that you can continue to grow your skills. Because one of the challenges of inquiry-based learning, because it is non-linear and it can lead you down all sorts of interesting rat holes, is it's very difficult to develop a comprehensive map of what you know until you've really explored a good chunk of a discipline. So if you are doing it infrequently, you inv end up reinventing the wheel a lot on ground you've already walked on, as opposed to if you have frequent windows of training, even if they're not long, if you even if it's 15 minutes a day, you can remember what you did yesterday. Oh, yeah, open up your your code or your tool or your software or whatever, and you're like, I remember this.

I remember that doing this yesterday, and and you you continue down those pathways until you run out. The other thing that you should consider, if it's possible, if it's there, is finding some kind of mentor, at least somebody or a community of people who are in that particular technique or technology or or uh system that you can ask questions to. So I participate in Stack Overflow, the the coding website, a lot. I a lot of questions like, hey, how do you do this? Has anyone ever done this?

Um and there are literally decades of answers on there for some of these programming languages. Uh where people's like, oh yeah, you know, you see in 2008, someone's asking how how do you do this? Oh yeah, I have that problem. And it helps you s solve individual techniques faster and not reinvent the wheel for something that is long standing and well proven. But especially since a lot of the folks who contribute answers on there, uh will say, Well, here's four different ways to do this.

So, example, I use the R programming language, so uh here's the tidyverse way and the data dot table way and the the D Plier way and the base R way, and you're like, Okay, got it. Here's how all these different things work. And having access to that knowledge in that community is is super helpful. So that's the technique I use. It is not for everyone.

Um if you are your brain works in this particular way, kind of scattered, uh I I joke attention deficit. Um really shouldn't in a lot of ways, because that is a clinical diagnosis um that I'm not qualified to make for anyone, including myself. But if you if you don't learn in a linear way, if you don't learn in a pick up the book, you know, and and just immediately start digging into the book, like, okay, just read the book, read the book, read the book. If that's not your style of learning, inquiry-based learning may be the way to go. But you have to be incredibly self-motivated to do it, to pursue it, and have a place to turn when you run into questions that you can't answer and you can't find uh a good answer for, and you may not have the language to ask uh for.

So uh communities of learning, very uh useful for that. Speaking of which, if you haven't already joined uh my Slack group, Analytics for Marketers, uh go to trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers and join our Slack group. Uh you can ask questions and if you're doing inquiry-based learning, a great place to to ask uh where to go next. Uh as always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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