Self Learning – Oxygen for Career

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
― Socrates

You learn by experience. You learn from your colleague in office. You learn from books. You learn from your mentor or teacher. You learn from the world around you.

Learning is a self realization. You may call it as an attitude or a quality. I would call Learning as ‘Oxygen’. Oxygen is required to support life without which humans can’t survive. Similarly, if you would stop learning, you would stop your intellectual growth.

You can be a favorite student of your teacher if you are show willingness to learn. Even you start loving yourself when you learn something new related to your field.

Learning is enlightenment. You learn from your mistakes. You learn from other’s mistakes. If you are open to learning then every moment teaches you a lesson which naturally adds value.

Teachers, mentors, they are like a ‘lightening’ in an individual’s life. They would be there for a fraction to light up the lamp within you but for the rest of your life, it’s you who has to keep the flame alive. As a student of testing you require independent thinking. You need to be self sufficient to light up your own lamp.

Self learning, self motivation or self realization is more important than outside inputs. And when you will understand their importance, that moment you will be self sufficient. You would design your own learning methods. That’s the moment you experience ecstasy in your learning. Similarly, you need to devise your own testing methods.

Look at the technologies, requirements or domain, they keep changing every minute. You have to make sure you sustain in the ever changing environment.

Few tips which may help you to design your own testing world:

• Find out opportunities to learn something new which would help to improve your testing skills.

• Make some notes related to the common bugs or some interesting observations.

• Find out the patterns of bugs

• Learn tools to increase your productivity

• Help your colleague to solve testing problem

• Read testing related books, articles and Blogs

• Write about testing. Create your own blog.

• Pick up any open software and start testing.

• Look around you will find best lessons for your testing

How long you are going to look for answers from outside world. They would definitely confuse you with their answers because they themselves borrowed that information from others.

Depending on outside world to solve your problem will ultimately lead to your knowledge starvation. Learn so much that you come up with your own style of testing.

And one fine day you will stop using those methodologies which never worked for you and you will only focus on doing things that convinced your heart while you were learning them.

Your learning would make you so strong that you may not need any external recognition like certifications. Your knowledge is your testimony, your certification. No external certification can replace your knowledge.

One day the world would recognize a good tester in you. You just keep learning with conscious mind.