In this post I will cover my current tactic for learning at work. Learning at work is not only good for your career but also makes your job why more fun, so without further ado here is my tactic for learning at work.

1. Find a book that focuses on a skill or technology related to your work that you also want to learn/improve. After you picked a book read a chapter or a couple in your free time or during the coffee break.
2. Apply the skills you learned from reading to your work. Doing this will hopefully give key insight how to improve your work performance. I recently started doing this myself and the first book I read was Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. The book is about how write code that is easy to understand. After only reading the first couple of chapters and applying information from those chapters while coding at work my coding ability started to drastically improve. This not only led me into deeper insight how to write cleaner code but also how important reading is to improve your skill set. It would probably have taken me years to learn only what was within the first three chapters on my own, by reading and applying what I learned at work it only took a couple of weeks.
3. The next step is to try to explain to some one else what you learned. The point of this is not just to teach someone else but also to illuminate what you might need to improve. It is very easy to think you know something when actually do not and explaining it to someone will point out where your shortcomings are. There are several ways to do this. The easiest way would be to explain to a college at work. It is also possible explain what you learned to yourself by writing it down. The point here is to find out where the holes in your knowledge is and try to sharpen it.
4. The last step is to re-read and learn the things you might have missed. This basically means repeating step 1 – 3 do this a couple of time until you have nothing more to improve. You do not need to do this right away after reading a book. It is very possible to start reading something new and then get back to an old book again after some time, usually you notice new things reading a second time this way.

I hope this short post have given you some insight into how you can learn at work. The strength of this strategy is that learning while working saves a lot of time and that books can give us insight how to improve that would take us years or decades to discover on our own.