Every day I devote about one to two hours of reading and learning for professional growth. I'm trying to keep fresh and current on new developments and what the experts are saying. Since I'm not in an office environment working with a team, I have to be more vigilant on my skills. They definitely dull without use.
I could probably spend all day every day reading about new developments, but if you can't apply them you don't really learn them. I take notes and hope to revisit them when I can use them - at least that's how I've learned most of my digital and social media knowledge over the years. It's really overwhelming if you don't take this in small doses. I've been following @ericpratum on twitter - and he is nonstop with the links for social and digital media. His links lead to more links, great blogs, etc. If I had a full time job, I could never keep up.
So how do you keep fresh in your profession? I think it's almost a full time job to stay current these days - at least in my profession and I would guess in others as well.
Thanks, Barbara :-) I use Google Reader for my subscriptions and then group them together into SEO, social media, nonprofit, etc. Also, I subscribe to http://www.reddit.com/r/nonprofit and similar things with Google Reader so that I can get information from or about sites that I do not subscribe to.
ReplyDeleteThen, when I find something that I like, I tweet it through timely.is, and if I comment on something, I bookmark it in Delicious, which I have set up to tweet as well. Timely.is gives me a log of things to tweet, and Delicious helps me follow up on things I've commented on to see if anyone has responded.
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ReplyDeleteI agree - keeping current in any profession is a full time job. I take classes all year long, every year. Since I teach journalism - I minored in it college - it is vital I keep up on all the changes to the area of print media as well as topics, including ethics. I have pushed myself into areas that have paid off - I am a Belfer I and II alum of the USHMM, I teach teachers theory and research, strategies of writing, tech and literature.I take classes to expand not only my professionalism, but my personal desire for knowledge that makes me better at my job.
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