[ponow]

Could it be that your particular position required more ongoing learning, and that has kept you better prepared for a changing world?

What fraction of positions require that ongoing learning, or at least to that degree?

Also, consider many other jobs, are they doing their job, and the doing of their job itself provides the experience that makes you a more valuable worker? Or is the doing of the job basically a necessary distraction from the actual task of preparing yourself for a future job? What fraction of humanity actually takes on two jobs, the paying job and the preparing-for-the-next-job? Might doing the latter get you fired from the former? Most importantly, is doing that latter job getting more important over time, that is, are our jobs less secure? If so, is this what is an improving economy, rising, as it were, with GDP?

[JohnMakin]

This has slowed down as I've gained experience but basically I am always volunteering to work on stuff I only have a shaky understanding of or never have done before. If I'm not doing new things on a job for ~1 year or more I get extremely uncomfortable, or start learning on my own. People call it "resume building" but I usually work for small skeleton teams where there's a ton of work available for someone that just volunteers to do it. That was basically how I crawled into my terraform/IAC niche, I was on a team where that was needed, they weren't going to hire, and no one else volunteered to take it on.

[CrimsonRain]

if you are in computer engineering and you are not doing "ongoing learning", you deserve to be left behind. While the company should provide some opportunities for learning, ultimately, it is your responsibility.

[endemic]

What's your strategy for continuing education?

[vel0city]

I tend to hop into projects even if I only have a cursory knowledge of the platform and spend time ferociously reading the docs as I catch up to speed.

I ask a lot of questions of those who do know parts of it. If I hear something I don't know or understand in a meeting I always write it down and research it later.

In a dev environment, I poke at things. Back up that config file, tweak some things, see what happens. Take stuff apart, put it back together. Revert things to put it back when I'm done. It's the dev environment, it's supposed to be shaken up and messed with.

With code, I find a good debugger for whatever new platform I'm trying to get into. Put some break points into interesting spots, step into to the function, step into, step into. See what's really happening. Inspect all the things. How does this thing actually tick? Watch it spin.

When an employer offers any time for training, I take it. I try and get as much out of it as I can. My employer offers some continuing education reimbursement. I use it.

And I try and also teach things at my place of employment. This forces me to actually challenge what I do know and really dig into the topic. Sometimes I find out what I thought I knew wasn't really true! We have a regular meeting on Monday afternoons to share and talk technology. I usually talk Kubernetes and containers on the third Mondays, digging deep into how all that stuff actually works. And it's not just me rambling for an hour, we usually get good discussion going about the focus on the talk and I end up learning something knew even though I'm the one presenting!

Make time in your work schedule to spend some time learning every week. Make yourself a 30 minute or 1 hour recurring meeting with only you.

And finally, there's probably a lot of small dead time moments you have in your life. I'm not saying make all of those focused on learning tech, but if even a third of the time you would have spent doing something else unproductive you instead catch a few more minutes of a training or listen to a lightning talk from a programming conference you'll slowly still glean new stuff and find more topics to dig into when you get a chance.