Most Popular Responses from our Community
I recently asked our Upskill Create Community this question: “What do you want to get from a Community of your Peers?”
Bottom line? We are looking for Shared Wisdom based on Experience.
Keep reading if you’d like to know more details…
In three months we had 115 responses made up of 1,248 words. I took the text of those responses and used several free textual analytics websites to evaluate what the keywords and phrases were:
Here’s a link to the source text if you’d like to analyze it yourself. I would be interested in your observations, especially if they are different from mine. Note: you must be an Upskill Create Community member to access.
Textual Analytics
I made a list of the most commonly used words, followed by their word counts. I also categorized them by Type (Action, Noun, Topic) as well as Primary (Large word counts) and Secondary (Smaller word counts).
Primary Action Words:
- Learn/Learning (39)
- Share/Sharing (39)
Secondary Action Words:
- Improve (4)
- Networking (3)
- Looking (3)
- Interested (3)
- Expand (3)
Primary Nouns:
- Knowledge (37) – Most commonly used with “Share/Sharing” (12)
- New (22) – Most commonly used with “Skills” (6)
- Skills (18)
- Ideas (14)
- Technology/Technologies (12)
- Information (10)
- Experience/Experiences (10)
Secondary Nouns:
- Inspiration, Insights, Free (4)
- Value, Benefit, Growth, Data, Clients, Challenges, Advice, Architectures (3)
Specific Topics:
- Cloud (5)
- Badges (5)
- Blockchain (4)
- Python (3)
- Data Science (2)
Shared Wisdom based on Experience
Our community members are not just looking for information (we can get that freely on the Internet), we are looking for interactions with each other that can help us make sense of all of that information.
We are looking for Shared Wisdom based on Experience.
When we have a need to learn new information, we will always encounter the “Pit of Despair” — the point at which we are learning something new that is challenging our mental capabilities. When we get in that pit, we aren’t sure if we can get out. It’s easy to give up at this point.
But, this is where having a trusted Upskiller can assist you. We can assure you that you can do it, because one of us has done it before. We’ll give you a hand-up or word of encouragement or a shortcut that can help you ascend to a higher plateau of knowledge. I talked about this a bit in my community post “Guru or Sherpa?“.
And, because we are a giving community, if we don’t know the answer we will help you find a solution either through research or locating others that can help!
Open + Social + Formal
In the training model known as OSF (Open-Social-Formal), a mix between these different ways is most effective. Each job will be different, but there is a rule of thumb of 70-20-10:
- 70% of our Learning comes from Job-related experiences. This is often called self-directed learning. Learning what you need to be successful in your job at the moment of need – aka “Just in time training”.
- 20% of our Learning comes from Interactions with others.
- 10% of our Learning comes from Formal Structured Training.
But these are not hard and fast percentages. Your job could have a mix of 50-35-15. These are just guidelines.
I personally learn by doing. If I can learn from others how to do something with step-by-step instructions, then that is the fastest way I learn. Learning from others is a “Smartcut“, a term coined by Shane Snow in his book of the same name.
A Smartcut is a way of finding the fastest way to achieving success through lateral thinking about problems. Don’t just try and solve the problem the way it always have been done, look at a problem with fresh eyes.
As an example, when Steve Jobs saw the bulky size of conventional laptops, he wondered why. The engineers told him the reason was because there was a big power supply required in the computer. Steve asked, “Why can’t the power supply be outside of the computer?”. And, so the engineers designed the early Apple Laptops with the power supply outside the computer attached to the power cord, and in so doing allowed Apple to design sleeker slim-line laptops.
This type of questioning and giving and receiving feedback from others is critical to finding Smartcuts.
I think most in our Upskill Create Community like to learn from others. We like to learn from others experiences, to not make the same mistakes they did and to do the things that were successful.
In fact, I need to finish up this blog post so that I can meet with an Upskill Create Community Member via a Zoom Video Conference to learn and collaborate! I’m not sure what’s in store, but I look forward to how we will help each other learn new things.
BONUS: Why do we need to collaborate? Because 2 can beat 20!
Join a community of like-minded people who want to make time for learning and encourage others to reach their goals.
If you need to teach and learn from others, you will need to connect with others in a community of like-minded learners. We’d like you to join us in the Upskill Create Community.
Just click this button to join today!
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